“If your life is like a tragedy it is because you have been neglecting something — most likely yourself.”
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
“It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.”
— Richard Whately
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
— Aldous Huxley
“Before the stroke, I was on a very spiritual plane. I ignored my body, took it for granted. When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those, I didn’t want to go anywhere near them. But the stroke reminded me that I had a body and a brain, that I had to honor them.”
— Ram Dass (Richard Alpert)
We seem to be always busy doing and thinking–even dreaming–a lot within everyday of our lives. Things deemed important in life in general as well as concerns about job, school, family and relationships in particular preoccupy our thoughts. Many times we just do things at random and what comes up along the way gets the priority over the others. An amorphous collection of things to do and think–initiatives and relationships–generally dominate the order of the day. There is too much concern on certain things while less, even nil, on others.
This scenario is commonplace in the human condition until we get to a particularly “more relaxed” point that engages us to reflect on the deeper matters of life. Then some neglected aspects of our circumstances come up with the realization that we have been unfair with them as we have simply and generally ignored and even forgotten them. They are like the seemingly less important and thus negligible skeleton within us without which none of our physical performances may ever be actually effected.
We could in a way be likened to mixed martial arts fighter Anderson Silva who some months ago very seriously fractured his left leg in full view of a horrified live audience during a UFC championship match with challenger Chris Wiedman. It was a terribly painful way to remind a highly rated gladiator of how important his skeleton was as he had always previously focused much more on his muscles and fighting techniques all the time until tragedy struck on that fateful night.
Thematizing the “skeleton” within us is symbolic of how we get to a stark realization of how we tend to neglect, ignore and even forget the ordinary presence of people, things, places and events in our daily lives until a point in time when we need them comes. Co-employees right in the workplace where we spend eight hours five days a week are just there and whose sporadic importance simply depends on the need of the hour. Friends and family who have always been supportive of every endeavor we get into but we only get mindful of them once in a blue moon. Things on the shelves we see day in and day out that we generally ignore until some very important need for them crops up and we just couldnt’ remember where we last saw them. These are all like the skeleton within us.
Of course, we reckon our limitations and because of these, we tend to neglect, ignore and forget. We are creatures of particular moments whose unilateral focus on very specific events gets an upperhand over and above other matters presumed to be of less significance. Then we get to a point of helplessness and failure and hence a realization that had we been mindful of some related and connected states of affairs, we could have successfully accomplished what we earlier started.
The point we have reached thus far is an acknowledgment not of these “skeletons´” non-existence because they are just there. In fact, in most if not all cases, we are actually using them as they assist us all along in the performance of certain tasks we need to do. They are not the proverbial “skeleton in the closet” of which we are always mindful not to expose in public for doing so would mean some modicum of risk.
(c) Ruel F. Pepa, 13 November 2014
ZETETIKOS 