Recollecting the Self

Recollection 

"The act of retaking yourself as a unity; stepping out of your life and retaking that which you ARE and rejecting that which you ARE NOT. Through this process, you rebuild your inner self.”

This thought-process builds squarely upon the Socratic maxim of "the unexamined life", as touched on yesterday. In life, we tend to fragment our inner selves to such an extent that we lose focus in the process. Because of this, it is therefore very important to recollect ourselves on a continuous basis from this fragmented state. If you are familiar with computers and the normal hard drives in them (not the new Solid State Drives), then you may know that your hard drive will become cluttered and will require defragmentation. 

According to Lifehacker, when your computer writes data to your drive, it does so in "blocks" that are ordered sequentially from one side of the drive's platter to the other. Fragmentation happens when those files get split between blocks that are far away from each other. The hard drive then takes longer to read that file because the read head has to "visit" multiple spots on the platter. Defragmentation puts those blocks back in sequential order, so your drive head doesn't have to run around the entire platter to read a single file. 

Your mind can become as defragmented as a computer hard drive, that is why it is important to put all your thinking blocks back into sequential order. This defragmentation process is similar to that of introspection and retrospection and is as such it is an integral part of living an examined life. 

This is an important exercise; Joseph Conrad finds it extraordinary how humans are able to go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears and with dormant thoughts. If you are unaware of your physical surroundings, you may lose your way, and this applies to unawareness of your inner surroundings too. People take sessions of defragmenting themselves for granted, resulting in them ending up with a so-called monkey-mind constitution. In such a state your thinking is like that of a monkey swinging haphazardly from one branch of a tree to the next branch, without any clear direction.

This may however not be the case if we continuously examine and recollect our thoughts and our lives because then we will have direction and purpose, and more so, we will have a better knowledge of who we are. 

Know who you are, have direction and walk life’s path with your eyes and mind wide open.

My fragmented self 

need to be retaken as a whole

otherwise, I will end up on a dusty shelve

as just another un-fragmented soul.