Arthur Miller died today.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I think about others around me, friends my age, who seem much wiser than their years. I think about wisdom, and how it’s a partially a product of experience, and how some people seem to have had many more experiences crammed into the same number of years as my own age, giving rise to more opportunities from which to learn than I’ve been privy to. I wonder if somehow they’re endowed with a greater ability to experience life, they’re more innately awake, aware, alive than the rest of us.<\/p>\n
But then I realize that time moves at the same speed for everyone. We all have the same capacity for accumulating experiences and memories that help make us who we are. I think that even if we’ve not had the same number of noteworthy experiences, every waking hour we’re absorbing our environment, if not with our conscious mind, certainly with our subconscious, so the sum total of our accumulated sensory information, both conscious and subconscious, must be the same for a given age. And granted, depending on our personality and disposition, we may respond more strongly to a smell, or a sight, or a certain touch, but the volume of information that we’ve stored through time is the same.<\/p>\n
What does this mean? Not much. I’m just fascinated by how our subconscious and conscious minds interrelate and how the smallest things will sometimes trigger a wave of emotion because they reach around our conscious mind and tap into what’s below, behind, beneath… It’s why we respond the way we do to a piece of artwork or a poem or a conversation or a song that may not be beautiful in the conventional sense, but that touches a nerve in the more voluminous part of our mind, the subconscious. It’s my paradigm for explaining what moves creative expression from good to great–the fact that I can’t get my rational, conscious mind around it, but that I do respond to it in a deep, resonating way. There’s so much more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arthur Miller died today. Sometimes I think about others around me, friends my age, who seem much wiser than their years. I think about wisdom, and how it’s a partially a product of experience, and how some people seem to have had many more experiences crammed into the same number of years as my own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}