The Adventures of Brother Owen

Random Thought

As a very young child, I used to, at times, intentionally try to capture and lose myself in a certain rare type of emotion, or state of mind. It was one of those feelings that one might not come across more than once every several years, like the unique moments of unplaceable nostalgia that can be triggered by certain smells or memories. This particular state of mind had to do with having the most tenuous grip on something unbelievably fragile, like trying to keep something balanced on the head of a pin, something infinitely important, and the feeling would come about right around the moment that I would realize I had lost the balance irreparably. It would generally come to me early in the morning as I awoke from a dream, but sometimes in daydreaming I could re-create it. At the time I could not place it, it simply captivated me because of its rare and foreign nature. Looking back, however, I realize that the feeling was anguish. It was the recognition of the complete loss of something at the moment of its occurrence, as the mind still reels to take in the enormity of the repercussions. When I would capture it though, it was always in its most stripped down form, created through abstract visualizations that were similar to the head of a pin analogy. I would imagine or dream these losses of balance on both cosmic and microscopic scales, sometimes it would be obliteration on the scale of the collision of stars, sometimes it would be some microscopic balance I was trying and failing to maintain. I was never able to hold the feeling for very long; my grip on it was just as tenuous as the one within my abstract imaginings. The feeling was very real though, and just as one is very good at remembering exact details from their childhood when an intense emotion was involved, I have a very vivid memory of some of the occasions, the visualizations, and my surroundings at the time. Apparently by artificially creating such a strong emotion, I was also enhancing my long-term memory of the moment.