So I have been trying to navigate my way through everything we have read this semester and everything I have learned as an English major all in order to write the best paper I have ever written and I am starting to feel like my brain is going to explode. So I have decided for this blog to take a different approach and navigate away from the texts and try to understand some things in terms of my own life, I have noticed that most people’s blogs have accounts of their own experiences and so I figured since I really haven’t I would do that now. Over this last weekend I was lucky enough to get to spend a few days with my Grandma, I am sort of blessed with one of those perfect story book grandmothers! Whenever I spend time with my family stories of me as a child usually come up and although I have heard these stories my entire life I was sort of struck by them in a different way this weekend. Each family member uses different word choices to describe me as a child: my grandmother says that I had a mind of my own, my mom says I was eccentric and that she loved my oddities as long as they never went too far, my sisters say I was a freak. Until this weekend it never actually hit me that all things considered I in fact actually was a freak. I was introverted and counted my pet cats as my primary friends (I even took framed photos of them with me when we traveled). Family videos of me show me asking not to be disturbed while doing serious work in the sandbox or putting Kleenex on the seats of swings before sitting down so as not to get dirty. My family often imitates me telling my mother over and over again that the mysterious scar on my knee was a result of being bitten by a zebra in Africa long before she was born. These have been things that my friends and family have always teased me about and I usually don’t admit them to a class of peers but when I came to the realization recently that I was in fact a total weirdo growing up I also realized why it took me so long to see what everyone else had always seen when they looked at me. To others I might have been weird but I never felt weird, instead I always felt like I was exactly who I was meant to be and I was where I belonged. Moments of complete clarity and understanding that are reached in epiphanic moments seemed pretty commonplace to me for much of my childhood. This has me wondering about what it is that ties memories and epiphanies, or at the very least understanding of self, together. Is it possible that when we have moments of revelation where we feel like we really understand all that we never did, we are not discovering anything new but simply just remembering something we had always forgotten? In the Gita, Krishna is in a higher state than mortals knowing the truths of the world because he is able to remember his many past forms and lives. Maybe as children we are closer to these past selves and therefore we understand the cyclical nature of time and everything that Eliot is trying to tell us and everything that Krishna is trying to tell Arjuna, as we age we forget and we then must remember to truly understand ourselves and our dharma. At 22 I no longer know exactly who I am and don’t know where I am meant to be but I can’t shake the feeling that maybe I was on to something when I was a kid and who knows, maybe the mysterious scar on my knee might just be from a zebra. Perhaps we have all just forgotten and epiphanies are moments of remembering.