The Colour of December

In early December I rounded the corner into a paved laneway and saw a smashed pumpkin, still freshly bright orange inside. Its thick pumpkin flesh was open to the world, and its different shades of orange depended on the light and the planes of the smashed pumpkin.

 

How it got there remains a mystery, but the thought skimmed through my brain that this pumpkin was the only bit of color in the whole area. Everything else was dark: grey, black, brown, dark blue, and colorless dead grass. It reminded me of a trendy store window I passed once. The entire stock was displayed in minimalist fashion, and every item—pants, jackets, tops, bottoms—was either black or dark brown. I tried to imagine who would be drawn to enter such a shop. Could anyone really say, "Oh, this looks like fun"?

 

Ideas flit, flit, flit through my head. Just like my hair, they're here today, gone tomorrow. Or, more precisely, here now, gone the next second. (Which reminds me. Have you heard this one? "Every moment is a gift. That's why they call it the present.")

 

Now where was I? When I was imagining how many thoughts pass through my grey matter, I was reminded of my writing group. Surely everyone has as many thoughts as I do. Surely we are all little idea-factories. Imagine the ideating atoms flying through the room when we meet to write. Fly, fly, flit, here, there, captured, not captured, gone, back again, ideas flying faster than the eye can see or the hand can record.

 

This fanciful idea echoed a recent newspaper item reporting that some scientific endeavor determined that each of us thinks 70,000 thoughts an hour. Of those 70,000 flitting ideas, only a small percentage make it to conscious thought. But—and here's the strange part—even those that don't make it to conscious thought become part of our memory, according to the scientists. Even your unconscious thoughts are stored in your memory, my dear. It's no wonder you don't have room to remember where you put your car keys!

 

Some 70,000 unthought thoughts settle into our memories without our even knowing it, taking up space. Can these thoughts ever be used?  How can you retrieve the memory of an unthought thought? How can you find it if you don't even know it's there?

 

Now I'm back to the flit-flit-flit phenomenon. I can't even remember or control the ideas I actually know about. And I haven't touched on the strangest part of all. How do scientists know that I have 70,000 ideas per whatever, and that these ideas go into my memory without my even having known that I was generating them? I certainly wasn't thinking those thoughts.

 

It's all too much for me. Just don't ever tell me that you've run out of ideas!

 

Copyright 2010 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com