Sometimes I feel ancient. Not old, exactly. More like…timeless. Every now and then it’s like I step outside of life and see its patterns and cycles, and I feel like I’ve done this so many times before. Endlessly. Over and over so many times that it’s beyond habit, it’s ingrained in my blood, in my breath. It’s like looking down from an airplane and seeing the lights of cities miles below you, a sort of fascination at how small and patterned it all is, how it seems like a painting or something, with an odd kind of order. Knowing that there are literally thousands of lives in that little square, all huge to each person living them.
I step outside the minutiae of my life and it all seems so small. I’m amused and touched, sort of like the way I feel listening to a small child upset by a trivial problem. I’m amused, not at their distress, but at recognition and remembrance of how those things used to make me mad or sad too. How familiar it is. It’s a sweet, almost nostalgic, not quite sad feeling. I watch myself from a distance and see the real big picture, and I think/feel “how cute…” and smile at my young self struggling through life, thinking she knows what life is about.
It’s like a double exposure, my ancient soul and my young incarnation, the image just waves for a moment and suddenly I see it from a totally different perspective. I suddenly feel outside the world, as if all of this has passed and I’m viewing it as a nostalgic memory. It lasts a few brief moments, and then I’m back again.
It’s a strange and somehow comforting feeling. It’s like a secret knowledge that I will win, that any difficulties I’m facing are temporary, that it will all come out right in the end, and my future (eternal?) self knows that.
I don’t really have any explanations for this. I don’t know if it’s my creative nature daydreaming. I’ve toyed with the idea of reincarnations and echoes of past lives. I’ve thought about deja vu and the theory that it’s a “brain skip” where you’re seeing the same thing you saw a second ago, but your mind is interpreting it as memory. I’m not sure it even needs an explanation, but when has that ever stopped me?
Richard Bach has a theory of a sort of oneness that we all come from, an eternal existence from which we choose the lives we will live, choose momentary ignorance so we can get the thrill of learning. And sometimes there are glimmers of awareness in our human minds of what we truly are, outside all this. The later the night grows, the more that makes sense to me, though it fades in sunlight, as most midnight thoughts do.
It happens more often as I get older, just these occasional moments when I can see my life with the clarity of an ancient someone completely outside it, and have love and fondness for who I am when I’m inside it. It makes me wonder.
