Cognitive Fencing
I don't think in words
Putting words on something that I already have in my mind is so hard. It's such a frightening chore of disentanglement. Sometimes I have periods where I can write stories in my head, but for the most part a sentence or two is the maximum that I can wrangle out.
I have been thinking about how I can try to improve this. I'll start by considering narrative. It goes from beginning to end; it's like a long string. When I tell someone a story of what happened to me, I either rehearse it in my mind, or I don't know where to begin. I start at the end and then say the beginning, and fill in what I missed in between.
This leads me to consider my understanding of time. Sometimes my memories are so strong that it feels like I am in all places, all ages, at once. It's like my life experience just goes in, drop by drop, into a big jug that is constantly rearranged, like boiling water. The steam is the stuff that I can verbalize.
Since time is processed in the mind in the same place that space is, I am going to try to improve this cognitive habit by increasing my spatial understanding and depth perception. One way I could do this is by estimating how many feet away I am from anything that I'm looking at. The other way would be to take up fencing. In fencing, you are faced with this buzzing point, and it's so shiny and wobbly that you can't tell if it is near or far, advancing or approaching. I think if I got good at fencing my problem would be solved.
2009-05-20, 4:19 p.m.