Unfamiliarity

Wow... it's been a while since I've updated this last again... hmmm, I'll have to post much more often.

This one is more intellectual than most of my posts, as it's more of a stream of consciousness piece, or at least some prose, possibly even the basic work of an essay that I'd likely never finish, but I was thrilled to feel it come upon me...

I was sitting around at a friend's, and this kind of came upon me, which was really nice because it's not very often that I feel particularly inspired to write, and even less frequently that I have the tools at my disposal to put my thoughts down. So this was very refreshing, and my thanks to Jaime for allowing the stars to align in this particular way.



When it comes to thought and emotion, it's pretty much established that we are all on a journey. What I've found, though, is that in some ways we can readily revisit a place along the journey that we've been before. Not literally or physically, as we can't see people we've lost or from whom we've been estranged, etc, but in the way of recalling how we felt at a very particular moment, and even going so far as to relive that moment in the feeling or feelings that were evoked from it. While the thought is initially fascinating, this seems to also be inherently dangerous when one considers many of the places that a lot of us have been in our lifetimes. For as those of us who, like myself, have crawled our way up from the fetid pits and craters within our own souls, can become greatly happy and together, we still have the possibility and the tendency to revisit those dark and lowly places.

This also becomes true based upon numerous trigger factors that remind us of those times and moments. Tokens and remembrances can have powerful impacts upon our psyches. Some of the things that visit us inside our heads are sometimes, therefore, potentially dangerous pieces, for they can act as fetters for our psychological well-being. It then, therefore, becomes somewhat necessary for us to have triggers that also take us OUT of our heads. Escapism, therefore, is not just a method of, as the name implies, escape, but instead an expedient method for us to press an internal "reset" button in our own psyches: a means to take us back out of those fetid pits and craters and bring us back to the peaks and valleys in which our current states are more developmentally suited.

(this next part actually came a little bit later, after further thought and consideration, but is still inherently related)

If the ability to revisit places in our emotional progression over time is based upon the conceptual ingraining of patterns of thought and feeling into the psychic foundations of our thought, then this is evidence of a need for the unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity is precisely what provides the escape, or reset, that we need. This is also because of the fact that, being unfamiliar, there is no past pre-set or default condition or pattern for our psyches to revert to in their experience. Being new and unfamiliar, we can only experience them in our current state, whereas familiarity bears the possibility of allowing our mental state to take the easy way out and take a path or revert to a state that it has already followed before.