Saving

We are what we do, and that is the terrifying thing.  What we do is not without consequences.  Of course.  Everyone knows that. But we try not to think too deeply about it, try not to watch the concentric ripples of our actions as they move out from their epicenter.  We are predetermined in many ways, we think.  Our genetics, our upbringing.  Often, we like to think we are a series of reactions.  "This happened, so I. . . . "  We only like to think of ourselves as active agents when the results are spectacular or heroic, or at the very least, pleasant.  "I planted a garden.  You should see the lilies." 

Sometimes, though, we do blame ourselves.  

I read somewhere about a study that demonstrates that the people with the highest levels of self-confidence in America are people in prison.  Rarely do they blame themselves.  

I have a book buyer I deal with on occasion, a man originally from India.  One day I told him that I had been going to yoga classes and that it had taken hold, that I practiced yoga all day long, the principles of yoga, when I walked and when I breathed.  He got very excited and began telling me about his own practices, that each morning when he woke, he practiced meditation before doing his yoga exercises.  Then he mentioned God.  

"Do you believe in God?" I asked him.

"Yea, man.  Sure.  Not one God but all of them.  God is everything and everything is God."  

I'm familiar with the concept, of course.  I've read my Emerson and Thoreau.  I've been intellectually engaged with the idea for a long time.  But his saying it just then made something click.  Timing and circumstance.  Yes, I thought, that is it.  God is a metaphor for everything that happens.  Everything in sum.  It is so big, it seems infinite.  And what we do contributes to the metaphor.  We are all parts of it.  

I got very excited, for now when people asked me if I believed in God, I could answer with an enthusiastic "Yes."  It was far easier than trying to explain the other and it would make most people far happier.  

I've written and read about Memory for a long time now, memory in many of its forms.  Nobody knows how human memory works, really, the physiology of it.  You can't find it anywhere.  It is a complex series of chemical messages of course, and scientist have found that human memory is not contained only in the brain but in all the cells of the body.  

Lately I've been imagining that memory might extend further than that, though, that it may reside in the chemicals that make up the cells themselves.  Chemical Memory.  It serves to extend my metaphor and makes me happy.  Somewhat.  The idea that what we do is stored in the very chemicals that make up the universe, that the chemical memory will somehow help to shape what happens after, that our actions have direct consequences no matter how infinitesimal, well. . . that is enormous.  

Maybe lately I've been weighed down by the idea.  It makes choosing everything more serious.  I'm not sure I am up to the job of shaping the universe today.  The other way of thinking might be more palatable, having something somewhere to which I might appeal, supplicant on bended knees, yes, but something that might change everything in a moment.  At times, we all want saving.