Influences

Every single being that wafts through our lives leaves some fraction of them in us. It could be in any form or shape. It could be tangible, like an oft-used phrase you picked up, or maybe something more nebulous, like a subconscious affinity to a color that the other person had also. Little things – arranging your shoes in some order; overwhelming transformations – your approach to some problems life throws at you. So many of these are traits and habits we pulled out from someone in our life at some point, willfully, or inadvertently.

Some insightful words from a pensive smith, (Danke, Idea-Smithy) greased my rusty brain a little. If we could be dissolving into the universe, giving morsels of ourselves to every part of it, then what is this universe? Is it just us? Are we this black hole that takes in fragments of all who fall in, just to enhance ourselves? And in turn we fall in and give back to this universe again. Maybe so, but with the good and the bad specks that we pick up in life, if we don’t sift through it and discard enough of the rancid portions, we only spread it through the universe again.

Clear water, devoid of color,
Red, black, white and life
Every plunge the brush would make,
Emotions, illusions, a touch of strife
But what is this life, without all that…