How do you experience each moment?
What does it look like when we zoom in on the moment? How do you know that what you are experiencing in this moment is authentic? What does it even mean to experience it in the first place? How can you make the most of your moments?
experience [ik speer ee uh ns] n. 1: a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something. (2&3 are alike 1) 4: knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone. 5: the totality of the conditions given by perception. all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.
I’d like to redefine this for you. For the purpose of my project and this blog, experience is the acquisition of minute knowledge through the physical senses and mindless perceptions of any particular moment in time. Later these minor learnings can be used in reasoning and rationalizations (whether subconscious or active muse) to verify, prove, validate, impugn, or otherwise substantiate your understanding and judgement of that moment.
The other side of the coin of defining experience is long term – which is number five from above. I’ll paraphrase to make a better connection; The dynamic entity that is the collection of both the minute knowledges and mindless perceptions, and their associated collective of judgements and other conclusions drawn.
Here’s my point: our collective experience continuously precedes the immediate experience, and thus will undeniably lend itself to either the enrichment or impoverishment of your once thought pure perceptions. Where there is perception there is deception – both predefined by your experience. That is, until we break out of the pattern of being predictable victims to our own shortsighted tendencies!
What is that? I’d say it’s pretty obviously a cat purring (and sniffing the microphone at the end), but how do I know that; why do I know that; what does hearing this add to the moment? What does experience have to do with appreciating this sound?
When I personally hear this clip I can’t help but include the context. While holding this cat I would feel her body heat and watch her breathe. There was a particular way she closed and opened her eyes that radiated peace and tranquility. It was neither blinking nor falling asleep, but rather it was as if she was closing her eyes simply to linger on what she had just seen, committing it to memory. I can’t help but imagine just how peaceful that would be, truly existing in the moment. It was a couple hours past dusk and there were six beings in the house, all of whom had completed unresolved tasks from the day. My dad was lying on the ground drifting in and out of an occasional slumber including a quiet intermittent snore. My sister next to me on the couch with her cat Cattiva in between us. Pixie the young beagle mix was entirely passed out around the corner. Mom at this time had gone to sleep shortly before, more properly and in her bedroom.
However, all this so far about the cat is the short term perception. The flip-side of experience that is the collective, perhaps foreshadowing my perception. I know that this cat is a hunter and has a wild heart. She can spend days and nights alike out of doors in the 10 acre “jungle” that is a cozy acreage in Pine Island, MN. This, I attribute to her upbringing. Cattiva was a member of one of my Grandpa’s final litters of barn cats before he passed away; she may in fact likely be the last surviving cat from his property near Ricketts, IA (though his PO was Charter Oak, and the school district in Schleswig, truly the “middle of nowhere”). She was born into a lifestyle that was truly part wild-part domestic and was coached to follow feline instinct from the very beginning. This is evident in her current home when she gifts rodents and the like to the household residents after a long day’s hunt. Her presence in my parents home brings the spirit of generations. Included in this cat’s identity is my association of visiting my grandpa as a kid: wandering through his acres of wild with paintball blow guns trying to hit branches and missing; learning how to properly and carefully use pellet and bb guns to hit aluminum cans and pie tins from a certain distance; watching him cook his signature scrambled eggs and sausages and baked sweet potatoes of unparalleled tastiness; and listening to my dad simply talk with his dad as they coexisted and caught up with each other about various hobbies and interests (while I was young I had little concern or understanding of the topics discussed, but just the memory of two people who I can credit my very existence being together brought me peace).
A bit of a divergence from the original question posed, but necessary to really get into the heart of what I consider aspects of this moment and how we experience and perceive it. It is in each and every “here and now” that the past, present, and future align as dimensions of our short term experience. It is important to train our perception to be open to all the backgrounds of this present tense. Without them, we can become unthoughtful, rash, intolerant, and otherwise entirely misled. Identities can get confused or lost all together. I’m definitely not telling you to spend as much time on each moment dissecting it as I did the purring of a cat, but just to remember that your experience is so much more meaningful and subtly complex than you may be giving it credit for.
So how will we move forth to make the most of our experience?
