What Sticks

For the last three days, I have written about Inner Space, Outer Space, and What Is Cast Off.

Today, I find myself thinking about what sticks.

As I walk down the path, I cross so many things, if I am open to seeing them. The tree that serves as a waypoint for so many birds. The holes in the ground marked by the small ones who occasionally pop their heads up, only to disappear again. The scent of the orange tree, intoxicating my steps to and fro.

These things enter me.

As much as we give off, we also take in. Through our senses, into our bodies, into our being, into the strange and largely unguarded territory of the psyche.

A smell can follow us home. A sound can settle somewhere beneath thought. The shape of a tree can remain long after we have forgotten the path that led us to it.

We tend to imagine perception as something we control. We look at what we choose to look at. We listen for what matters. We filter out the rest.

But most of the world enters without asking.

Years ago, I used to tell my mom that when I tripped on mushrooms, the little man who normally stood guard over my sensory input had decided to take a vacation. He was the gatekeeper, the one who determined what was relevant, what was vital, and what could safely be ignored.

Then, suddenly, he was gone.

The doorway was open, and everything arrived at once.

Color was not simply brighter. It had weight. Sound did not remain at a distance. It entered the body. The space between objects seemed alive with information I had somehow agreed not to notice before.

It was not that the world had changed.

The filter had.

Perhaps this is what attention does in smaller, more sustainable doses. It sends the gatekeeper away for a moment. Not forever. We need him. Without some form of sorting, the world would overwhelm us. There is too much motion, too much sound, too much life pressing against the edges of our awareness.

But the gatekeeper can become overzealous.

He can begin to dismiss almost everything.

The bird becomes background. The burrow becomes a hole. The orange blossom becomes merely part of the landscaping. We move through the day receiving only what appears urgent, useful, or addressed directly to us.

The rest is cast off before it ever arrives.

Still, some things get through.

A scent. A flash of yellow in a tree. The sudden movement of an animal at the edge of the path. A line someone said years ago without knowing we would carry it for the rest of our lives.

We do not always choose what sticks.

This may be why memory is so disobedient. The moments we believe we should remember can fade, while something insignificant remains perfectly intact. The pattern of light on a kitchen floor. The smell of a parent’s car. A bird landing on a branch while we were thinking about something else entirely.

The mind keeps its own archive.

The body keeps another.

Walking the path, I sometimes wonder what I am collecting without knowing it. What has entered me today that will return years from now? What sound, scent, or small movement is already fastening itself to some future moment?

Perhaps attention is not only the act of noticing what is there.

Perhaps it is also the recognition that what is there is becoming part of us.

The tree is no longer only a tree once I have watched the birds return to it. The holes are no longer empty once I have seen the small heads rise and vanish. The orange blossoms do not remain beside the path. I carry them away in breath, in memory, in whatever private chemistry turns sensation into meaning.

We leave traces everywhere.

But the world leaves traces in us as well.

Some are immediate. Some wait.

And some stick so quietly that we do not know they are there until, years later, something opens the door.