Inspiration & memory

Moments and sparks while in Oregon

I was walking out of a coffee shop in Oregon the other day when a tiny brown napkin flew across my feet. What followed was a cascade of memories that brought me back to a particularly creative winter.

It was the first year of the covid pandemic (and grad school). I was holed up inside my apartment. The days were lonely at times, but also full of aliveness and energy. I sketched, read, wrote, played guitar, and walked around whenever the wind and snow had settled. “I could spend most of my days like this,” I said to my penpal. We talked about how easy it is to forget things, and then I suddenly remembered the first time I visited New York City.

In particular I recalled walking the streets with a stranger I met on the last day of my trip. I had asked her to watch my luggage for me so that I could buy something from the Bryant Park library gift shop. There were other motives too, frankly: I thought she was attractive and had wanted to talk to her. So young, so bold, so naive—she could have ran with my things!—but we ended up enjoying the city together. We got coffee at a local shop, walked to and through Central Park, shared dreams and stories, and struggled to find a public bathroom, all within the span of three hours. The goodbye was short and sweet, just like her, just like the memory.

I’d always been a shy kid (imagine bookish, bespectacled, Asian gamer) who believed he was unattractive. So it was a big deal for me that the adventure had gone so well. The experience was incredibly formative. And then I forgot about it. When I’d tell people about the time I won a trip to NYC (through a Freakonomics raffle!), the story with the stranger was always omitted. That it had come back while talking to my penpal in the midst of winter, years later, generated some images in mind regarding the nature of memory.

I pictured a kind of book, one with an infinite number of pages containing the full content of our lives. These books were physical, meaning they suffered too as bodies do when held by the hand of time. Ink rotted into dust, pages loosened and floated away with every flick of a page-turn. Retrieving memories was thus like chasing after ghosts and symbols that, when obtained and superimposed on one another, could constitute a life.

Who was doing this busywork of encoding and retrieval? I imagined a ghostwriter inside each of us. They served as crucial members in the society of the self, and were also subject to time and processes physical. Mine was a forgetful old man with wobbly, boney hands. He spent his days in the dark rooms of my mind binding disparate pages together for future retellings. Sometimes the pages flew away and landed in other hands, where they could be transformed and remembered differently. Memory is both an image and an imagining.

Back in Oregon, the napkin flew toward rainbow-streaked streets. I followed and was brought to an unexpected connection between meditation and inspiration. On a basic level, we navigate the world with a set of feedback-enforced models that shape our future thinking, feeling, and behaving. That is, we operate on mental heuristics that determine what we perceive, how we interpret it, and what we do in response. Sometimes this results in behavior that may not fit the demands of the current moment; it may reflect past patterning more than our truest desires and values. What certain meditations can do, then, is free us from these patterns by enabling clarity and other ways of being. Inspiration and unexpected connections naturally arise.

I had meditated earlier in the day. I had practiced remaining uninvolved with the contents of perception in the space of “open awareness”, where things could be just as they are. Here they can also potentiate as new interpretations and responses. The napkin could have just been a usual napkin: a cheap product intended for particular uses; trash once touched and used; an object loaded with prior meanings. Instead it transformed into something else entirely. It morphed into a vessel that transported me to pages of memories that were loose in my mind but not entirely lost. All of this is possible should one be open enough to receive and dwell in possibility.

I thought back to the NYC stranger and wondered what she was up to, what kind of life she was living, whether she had transitioned into the design career she longed for. Her name eventually came to mind, and I found her on social media. As I sifted through her posts and images, a smile grew inside of me and made its way to my lips. She’d gotten married and was working as a graphic designer.