6 million moments

Share

A "psychological moment" in your life lasts about three seconds. That means you'll experience (excluding sleep) about 6 million moments in a month; 20,000 in a day. How many of these will you remember? Very few. The rest will simply disappear, wisps of clouds that slowly give way to the mental equivalent of a blue sky.

The tyranny of the remembering self
The only way we get to "keep" any moment of our lives is to store it in memory. It is our "remembering self" that determines what we remember and how we remember it. So what criteria does your remembering self use to determine what to keep and what to forget? It uses your life story. According to Daniel Kahnemann (Nobel laureate and psychologist), our ongoing life narrative sits in tyranny over our experiencing self, filtering and shaping our experience to fit our story's form. If I tell myself a story that I must defend myself against rejection from others, I filter my encounters against this story line, remembering what fits and forgetting what doesn't. If I tell myself a story that I am quite happy in my life and have everything I need, I also filter accordingly.

One sensational minute
For the next minute, widen your awareness to bring to consciousness as many of the sensations flooding through your body to your brain as you can. What can you see? What do you hear? What do you feel on your feet or between your fingers or under your skin? Is there a taste in your mouth? Although it can be exhilarating for the short term, opening to the rush of sensations for longer periods of time overwhelms consciousness. To guard against this overhwhelm, our brains filter our sensations. In other words, our stories keep us sane. It's interesting to note, however, that this filtering occurs before we are conscious of it. Most of what we experience remains forever lost to our conscious minds. In fact, about 98% of what you experience, you won't remember.

The good and the bad news
What are you choosing to remember? Are you focusing on finding a way to share yourself with the world? Are you focusing on how everyone you meet sooner or later dissapoints you? Are you focusing on how anchored and grounded you feel in nature? The good news is that whatever you focus on is what you'll remember and these memories will reinforce your "story filter" for future encounters. That's also the bad news.

Can you change your story?
You can change any story line that's causing you distress. How? Pretend that the opposite belief is true. Maybe that means "pretending" that people are trustworthy, that things do go your way, or that your life is simple and peaceful. And, here's the fun part. Spend a day living "as if" this belief were true for you. Consciously look for proof that this new thought is true. Go hunting for new experiences that contradict your old story line. You may find, as promised by Thich Nhat Hanh, that "we have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize."