how much to give

Many years ago when I was reading everything I could get my hands on, I ran into a story about a man who was taken prisoner and put into an impermeable box, with the only instruction being that if he could escape, he could remain free without any more apprehension. He thought long and hard about the box, how a box represents dimensions in all directions. One day his captors discovered he was gone. They never thought about the box the way he did. They didn't realize that one could move in any direction inside a box, and that includes backward through time. The man simply moved backward through time until the box was no longer there and then walked away.

I suppose the first thing anyone would say is that we don't have the capacity to do that, so that is impossible.

But we do...

...if our head is the box.

We are stuck inside our heads. We get stuck in moments and can't seem to get past them. What if we move backward through time before those moments arrived?

We cannot unmake those moments, but we can arrive at a time where those moments didn't have us stuck.

I've been working on that.

There is a certain letting go that must happen, though.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Also many years ago, I had brief visions of my progress. I've mentioned them on blogs awhile back. I'll put them all together here again. When they started happening I didn't know what was going on. It was during the time between the abortion and the long, dusty road. I would see them briefly in dreams or nearly waking states just before I woke up, or sometimes fully awake.

In the first one, I was a kid with my family in a station wagon, driving along a long empty highway through big empty fields with a simple barbed wire fence running alongside. I looked up at a mountain we were passing and wished I could get out and see it.

In the next one, the car was stopped, and I was ducking through the barbed wire into the field at the foot of the mountain, which seemed like a long way off.

In the next one I had crossed the field and stood at the very base of the mountain about to climb. (Just had the craziest deja vue writing that line.)

In the next, I was picking my way up the first small slope. It wasn't easy, but I was enthusiastic and didn't stop even when a rock slipped and I bruised my shins and stuff.

In the next I made it over the first slope and looked up and realized the mountain was absolutely huge and would take a very long time to scale. I looked back at the car still sitting by the side of the road. It looked small, but much easier to get to than up the mountain. I turned back to the mountain and looked up. I wanted to see the way the eagles could see way up there.

In the next I had started on the mountain in earnest. I was still very near the bottom, and discovering that mountains are very 3 dimensional and don't always just go up all the time. They can be pretty and pleasant in spots.

In the next I was in a very steep climb and it felt like the hardest thing I was ever doing in my life.

In the next I was atop the first small bluff and realized, looking up, how very small that amount of work was. I looked back at the car. It was a dot. I knew it was my last chance to go back without getting lost on the way back. I turned back to the mountain and looked for another bluff to climb.

And it was like this, over and over, brief stretches of how far I got. There was a point where I was scaling a very sheer face to another blufftop, and it took a lot longer than the rest all put together, and I kept telling myself once I reached the top, I'll have succeeded. Reaching the top was a wonderful relief, yes, but it clearly wasn't the top at all. I just couldn't see over and past it from where I had been. I could have stayed on that plateau, and I did for awhile. And then I committed to finding the actual top, with the realization that I'd be topping many other areas before I ever got there. BUT, I was able to look down from there and begin to see like the eagles.

Further on, further up, I ran across a cave opening. I wandered in, very tired. I noticed a light so I went in further. I crept into the very dark places where there were beautiful lights and very interesting music that lulled my mind whenever I got close to and settled near a light. They were gems of all brilliant colors glowing in the dark, and I lived among the blind salamanders for what felt like a long time before I realized I was entrapped by the colors and the music. It took more than one vision to see this play out, and in the end I tore myself away from the comfort of having my mind lulled and crept around in the horrible painful dark of the cave before I finally found a way back out into the sunlight so I could start back on my climb up the mountain.

That last paragraph is important. It doesn't matter  how high you ascend, you can still be ensnared and your mind lulled.

Anyway, after that I kept climbing and climbing. There were parts where clouds misting by made it hard to see how far I was getting, and other parts where brambles and steep slippery moss and wet rocks made it hard to keep advancing without sliding back over and over. There were more bluffs to plateau onto.

I saw all that. After the long, dusty road happened, those stopped.

I look back now and I think I was being shown my future here in this life. I didn't realize back then that I could see it without understanding any of it.

And I have been living that out.

The cave part with the lights and music might be what I've just come from, not sure yet. I can feel myself emerging from a deliberate lengthy time out while I was dealing with real life in flux all around me. I don't know if lulling out was a good idea or not, dreaming through part of the learning ascent, because I wasn't ascending in the vision, more like lost.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I loved one particular class in high school where I learned to diagram sentences. I think that was the very first of my discovery that other people speaking poorly was the problem with my crazily misunderstood interaction with them. I was still too green and naive to work on that constructively, just enjoyed a new toy. I still have to diagram sentences in my head when I misunderstand people. Pronouns are the worst. 'It' refers to a particular thought in one sentence, leaps to another meaning entirely in the next. 'It' doesn't tell me which noun it's attached to when another person has broken the diagramming. I come to a completely erroneous conclusion based on that other person not taking the time to notice they switched off without reattaching anywhere. A few minutes later it clicks and my world is all good again, but for several seconds or even minutes, everything is facepalm and I'm not understanding why the other person messed stuff up so badly that I was trying to fix. But they didn't really.

I'm seeing more and more that my friendships through time have broken apart because of something as simple as the other person never having learned how to diagram a sentence, and misunderstandings galore happen because my head cannot leap and click on the fly like that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I still believe I came here to this life, mind stunted, if you will, for a very good cause. I believe I'm here to do something, and that is talk to you. I believe my thoughts are part of you now, and you will go on and do what you came here to do with my encouragement.

Yes, you. This was not a chance meeting. This was not an accidental read.