The Mater of Mater

I've been living near Victoria Park for close to two years. That's enough time to notice a change in yourself. But the question is - would I have noticed that change as much as had I moved elsewhere?

This park is teeming with flashbacks. Along my running route lie piles and piles of my past me's, discarded versions of potential selves like spare parts in a ghostly puppet-making workshop. Or a painter's studio. Everything that didn't work, that didn't make the cut, is scattered here.

But it's the park itself that holds the memories, like an external storage device. I never think about these things unless I'm here. And then I remember them the way that Robert M. Pirsig's schizophrenic character in Zen or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remembers the life of his alter ego: they are sudden, fragmentary flashbacks of how I used to feel.

I used to feel very very afraid. I felt weak, unsure that I'd manage to handle the overwhelming challenge of a full scale adult existence. Anxious to achieve some form of success and fearful that I would fail to achieve it. But I don't feel like that anymore. And it's not as simple as saying that I no longer feel anxious about achieving success.  It's more like that my categories of thought have shifted so much, mutated so that the old notion of "achieving success" simply no longer exists in the same format, the way an egg no longer exists in the same form, once you add it to the dough, knead and bake it in the oven.

Trying to empathise with your past self if an eerie exercise. It's sometimes as hard as trying to empathise with another person ("what was I thinking?!"), except that glimpses of what you were thinking will now and again flash through your mind. And they are alien-familiar. What mind reading would feel like, if it existed. Say, what it felt like to be in love with someone, or not to be in love with them. Alas, you can't unknow things.

So then space is important. Objects. People. Those elements outside of ourselves that store our thoughts, our memories, our sense of passing time, of who we are, of change. Is why I missed London during my long exile. Is why, in London, I miss travelling and the places in which I used to live. We're weird creatures, with weird selves that span spacetime in weird unexpected ways, like forests, like bacteria.