Been There Done That

I like to think that most times I have some sort of control over my life. And while external forces undoubtedly impact my existence and path, I am typically steered by my (good or bad) decisions. What I have been experiencing lately though disturbs me greatly over the enormous sense of lack of control that it causes.

I am speaking about that seemingly universal human experience of déjà vu. Most people on the planet have had a similar experience and the most common type of déjà vu is that you have already experienced something before. The latest time for me came the other night when Bud was reading a kid’s French book to work on his vocabulary. He asked me what a word meant and passed me the book. I was suddenly flooded with the feeling that we had had this conversation already, that I had seen the picture in the book before, that I had contemplated its meaning and that all this had happened while I was sitting in the same position on the couch and in same relative position to Bud.

When this happens my heart tends to seize up and I get an uncomfortable feeling almost like I have come unstuck in time. Its incredibly disconcerting. Of course, I am not able to pinpoint the moment when this happened before since this feeling is not one of recognition but of repetition.

And I hate it.

I am sure that there are a myriad of psychological or physiological explanations for this phenomenon and I am not about to speculate that it could be something paranormal (Matrix-like or otherwise), but whatever the theory that there is, I find it to be a disturbing psychologically traumatic moment. And it seems to come for me in waves. For long periods of time I won’t experience it at all, and then suddenly I’ll have a déjà vu moment a number of times in the same week.

This is sort of linked to another emotion that I get near stairs or railings. I always have this impression that someday I am going to oddly lose my balance going up some stairs (always up…) or walking by a railing and tip over it. Maybe its just the psychological backlash of being tall. But while this one is more of a pre-cognition type of emotion it doesn’t bother me. Can’t control the future. But the déjà vu experience where it seems like I am repeating things in the exact same way makes me feel almost like I have already experienced the future and have now gone back.

But this is all linked to time. Time has often been one of the most fascinating concepts to me. The correlation of time to speed interests me on an intellectual level. If time slows down the faster you travel (according to Einstein at least), then is time linked to the speed at which the Earth rotates at all, the speed at which we walk/run, the speed at which our hearts pump? To me time is probably to most interesting concept of physics that I can’t quite grasp and yet its impact on me is ever present.