Packaging for consistency in experiential digestion*

When I first returned from Japan, the most frequent question people asked was how it felt to live in Japan and how it felt to be back. The answer was always the same: it simply felt normal. And this normalcy really started me thinking about how we as humans digest our experiences and why mine was leading me to feel like leaving my life as I knew it for an entire year and then coming back into it was, in a phrase, no big whoop. Having the chance to talk about this with many people, I became good at describing my idea in person relying heavily on the hand gesture to illustrate my thoughts. These ideas are resurfacing now as I get used to my new surroundings and seeing how I've started a blog about this kind of thing it seemed like a good time to put these ideas down using actual language and not relying on the cop-out mechanism of hand gestures and the frequent repetition of, "you know?" So, here we go:

We understand time in a very different way than we experience it. It is a necessity that we experience life linearly because we are trapped in time. There is nothing we can do about its progression and, being human, this is how we all experience life. However when we stop to reflect or digest experience, it's never in a purely chronological fashion. I find that I group things by category and compare these similar experiences with each other, looking for meaning not just in the individual experience but in how it relates to other similar experiences. We might consider the memories chronologically within these subdivisions, but they don't blend together with all experience like a deck of shuffled cards.

This is why it didn't feel strange to have spent a whole year in Japan, why it felt 'normal.' Even though I've never been there for such a long time, I had been there many times, so this last year just added another layer to the "my life in Japan" category which has been growing since I was born. Of course there are things that were unique about this most recent experience - it's not as though I can't differentiate between the experiences since I do think about them chronologically within the category - but I think about them categorically as the same thing. I started to think about how I viewed other experiences and I found that this categorizing persists: time in LA blends together even though they may be months or even years apart; experiences at college and graduate school seem to be lumped together. It even explains why sometimes when you see someone after a long period of absence, it feels like no time has passed at all: because in your categorized experiential memory of them, no time has passed. It's not that you don't see change or that you don't experience differences, but the divided moments are linked. These categories can be as defined as 'experience in a particular place' or as loose as 'things experienced under the influence of a certain emotion.'

The confusion begins when one memory fits several different categories and how we relate to that memory becomes divided and less clear the more we try to relate to it. Also, as we age and as our experience necessarily broadens as time passes, there are more categories, cross-categories, subcategories and as such reorganizing of thought that needs to occur! What a mess.

*A note about the title: I wrote down that sentence in my notebook forgot about writing it and just saw it again today and had no idea what it was about at first. I really had to dig deep. So if this word salad makes no sense to you, you are not alone. I am apparently not exempt from my own verbal obfuscations.