I’ve been thinking about my mental state lately.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my view of life is something like the view one gets looking into a convex rear-view mirror. You know, those rounded mirrors that give you a wider angle view but at the expense of distorting the image making things appear smaller and farther away than they really are.

It makes both time and distance seem farther away. Your children are born, the time when they will grow up and leave it seems so far away, but then BAM! It hits you unexpectedly.

And then the distance, seems so great, even though you can get on a phone and for almost nothing be talking to them.

I think everybody shares this to a degree, always, when we look back on the past it seems to have gone by very quickly. That phenomena is often referred to as time compression.

But I think my mirror is a bit more convex than most.

I wonder to some degree how this may have been affected by experimentation with various hallucinogenic substances when I was young.

The hallucinations I experienced were largely visual and perceptual, occasionally auditory. At first they are very disorienting, but after a while you learn that you can not trust your senses. And maybe that learning contributes to the sense of distance. It’s hard to be convinced that things I can only see or hear are real. But if I can touch something it is real to me.

There is a period after a baby is born in which it has not learned the permanence of objects, that is, when something leaves it’s visual field it believes that it no longer exists. Knowing that something, not visible, still exists, is a learned response.

I do wonder if I didn’t unlearn that to some degree, causing me to experience my daughters moving out to be more like a death than mere distance.