September 15, 2008

• Mind, Body and Spirit

  Body

  I noticed my body today because it made me. I must have gotten about 5 hours of sleep (I was up attempting to translate an Old English translation of the Bible into Modern English. Yay grad school). I taught this morning from 8am-9am, held office hours from 9:30am-10:30am, then read in the library from 10:30am-noon. I attended class at 12:20pm and sat there until it ended at 3:20pm. I went home, changed, attempted to make some semblance of a meal (but  had no time to eat so I ended up eating a blueberry bagel in the car), and then left to head to work. I will be here until 9pm. My body is protesting. Not vehemently, not the way it would, say, if I were dehydrated or in need of warmth, but it is unhappy. I know this because my left knee is throbbing, and I can almost picture it like an old man, grumpy with a surly, gravelly voice going "I'm not pleased. Not at all." My eyes are heavy. I am tired. I looked down at my right middle finger, at the spot where, in haste on the first day of teaching, I slammed my finger in a drawer and essentially ripped of a part of my nail bed. It is healing nicely (odd how skin pulls in on itself and heals), and will probably leave a scar, but now and then if I move too quickly I pull the wound taut and it hurts just a little. My body makes me aware it quite often.

  Mind

  Oddly enough, we are able to conceptually separate mind from body. I say "my body makes me aware it", separating immediatelly my body and me. I am, essentially my mind am I not? I am the voice that narrates what I see, I am the author, the thinker, the analyzer. My mind is a large portion of my personality. It endears people to me, once I get them to smile or to feel comfortable around me. My mind makes me me.

  Spirit

  But what of my spirit, which essentially is synonymous with soul? My mother says that we are mind, body and spirit. We are things that think, and move, and...love. Is love then the proof of a spirit? We do not love with our bodies (well, I suppose we can, and do, but it is an expression, not the origin of the thing), and we do not love with our minds (well, we ought not to anyway). So what enables us to love? There is something in between physically feeling and thinking. Some people believe in auras, in another way of seeing people, in not seeing only their physical selves but the other bits of them, represented in hazy color. I used to sit quietly for minutes at a time and stare at the bathroom door. Somehow it seemed like I existed in various ways doing that. Physically yes, because I could see the door, the little patterns the wood made. Mentally, because there were words forming, thoughts. But also in another way. I felt, sitting there quietly, and turning my head this way and that, that I was existing in another way, that I was beginning to understand what it meant to be a person, to be a thing that could look at its fingers and know that others could see my fingers but not feel them the way  I could. That there was another part to being me that was more than possesing fingers and being able to move them with my brain. That I was Tricia. And no one else could be Tricia because I already existed. I was probably around 6.

  This is probably one of more random thoughts I've had today, and it sounds terribly like something you contemplate on a plane or on a beach or on a mountainside in South America. I could blame it on my fatigue if I liked, but the truth is that I like existing as Tricia. Because no one else can.

  • 5:51 pm
  • 6 Comments