Self-Awareness

I have no idea what others say to themselves in their heads; I don’t even know if all people have verbal cognitive behavior.  My internal dialog – mentation – is a mishmash of spontaneous phrases, images, fantasies, memories, simulations, reflections, hopes, and questions.

Unless I’m focused on some particular subject, my thoughts – the mishmash – are relatively random.  At my age, reflection becomes an avocation; any deadspace between focused activities engenders remembrances and analysis and emotions.

Aging facilitates self-appraisal and therefore heightens consciousness – that bastion of humanness that protects us from the perception that we are merely clever animals.  Unfortunately, the questions that arise during episodes of heightened consciousness  are usually quasi-philosophical or cosmological.  Meaning, they don’t lead to answers they just lead to more questions.

Some of the questions are about “being;” questions like have I used my time well, am I where I wanted to be, have I done anything of value, do I really know the people I call friends and talk to, what is love, and does my life have meaning?

These are not pedestrian questions that can be dismissed – although the average human will default to “I have two fine children,” in response to the question about whether their life has meaning.  Die gestalt of this issue is best communicated by the scene in the move “About Schmidt” when Jack Nicholson rises up on his elbow and looks over at his sleeping wife.  His expression captures the daunting befuddlement of realizing that one’s life is only existence, without intimacy, purpose, or intensity.

I think the people who stay out of their heads are well advised to do so.  Many people have inherited disadvantages that self-examination would intensify.  Realizing that one is morbidly obese, intellectually disadvantaged, or aesthetically unappealing would be a harsh experience.

Fairly bright people are at a disadvantage because they are gifted with enough intellect to see where they fall in the great chain of cognitive capability and they know that the extremely bright and gifted have pronounced advantages over them.  The bright are just smart enough to know who is really smart.

Smart people who have appearance problems probably investigate the deeper questions about existence with a propensity to most easily see the negatives.  Their experiences have probably not been positive socially and particularly with the opposite sex.

As Larry Darrell, a character in Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge said,

“I'm not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?”

But, I’m just guessing; I have no idea what goes on in the heads around me.  It would be an amazing experience to have the opportunity to experience life through someone’s consciousness.  We might find some disturbing thoughts and fantasies.  But to paraphrase an observation Somerset Maugham made in his non-fictional book, The Summing Up – if others knew everything that went through our minds, they would think we were monsters.