The sound of time passing isn't the tick of a clock but the dripping of a tap. We are permeable: transient creatures, soaking up particles of who knows what from who knows where. They penetrate our skin and travel through us, unknowing and uncaring, leaving an unseen residue to desiccate beneath our awareness.
Experience is a form of osmosis. We can't control the deluge of action that floods through us, right from the moment our mothers' waters break to the moment our hearts stop pumping. All we can do is try to filter it.
It puddles in the back of our brains - action and reaction; stories told; punches taken; relationships broken; achievements realised; parents, siblings, friends and pets loved; the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of all the tangible world.
The inspirations and tribulations between the hundreds of thousands of breaths we take: they pool in us, coalesce to form the reservoirs of our memories and the force of our personalities.
That reservoir can be as pure as a Scottish mountain stream or as stagnant as a woodland swamp. When we dip our mind into its depths we can either be refreshed and enriched or poisoned and twisted. It's this notion of how our personalities develop through our experiences and how we then influence both our own lives and those of others for either good or bad that concerns me most at the moment.
I was very privileged to grow up in two wonderful (and literary) places, Crowborough in Sussex and Great Malvern in Worcestershire. Crowborough was right on the edge of A.A. Milne's Ashdown Forest - where Winnie the Pooh was set - and C.S. Lewis' Great Malvern, which it is alleged was the inspiration for Narnia. It was very easy to be inspired by such wonderful backdrops as these. Thinking back to playing in the woods and hills, being told stories of spirits and gods by my family, it's no wonder I was inspired to write my own stories. Trees, grasses and hills still inspire me within moments. To this day all I have to do is go off on my own to where I can't hear the engines, shouts and sirens of modern life and I become a much more centred, relaxed and spiritual person.
The hardest thing is, what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a concrete world? When your backyard is full of booze, drugs, domestic abuse, puke and shit on the pavements, sirens 24/7 and street fights between beggars? I love Blackpool, it has its own charms but the place can feel like acid rain when you dip your mind into its waters. It can really get to you. It winds me up to the point of panic attacks sometimes and since I've moved here I've gone from writing regularly about spirituality and inspiration into characterising serial killers. That's gotta say something about the place.
I'm currently on holiday soaking up some time and actively attempting to purify the cesspool that has been dripdripdripping its way to capacity in the back of my mind. I find it hard to concentrate here. The inspiration I used to find in hills and valleys, woods and silence has been replaced with a more hostile ecosystem, a cacophony that drowns out any positivity you sing into it. And yet we still remain here, polluted but striving for purity.
When your backyard is full of broken things, where can you turn for peace and inspiration? Where else but reading and writing. It's always been an escape, imagination. And that's the trick really, learning to jump in the puddles experience has dripdripdripped into you and splash about with the glee of a child, regardless of what diseases may be lurking in the water. To turn the pooling depths of memory into a kinetic force of YOU, to make energy out of stagnation and positivity out of inertia.
Imagination is a lifeboat that should be clinged-to. A lifeboat in the center of a reservoir of experience, a reservoir of thoughts that pool in the back of our brains, particles floating through us. Us: a solitary group of atoms in a seaside town. North of England, West of Europe, A small dust mote of a planet, floating amongst billions of stars who blaze amongst billions of galaxies. If you look up, sometimes you can see them. The neon tries to blot them out but we know they are there in uncharted sea of eternity. If you breathe deep enough; deep enough and long enough; sometimes you find the courage to dive in.