What Makes an Impression

What makes an impression? Besides what comes in from the five senses, I mean. I’m getting a few clues, partly due to COVID, thank you very much.

Background story:

By day eight post COVID symptoms starting, even though I showed a faint pink line on the test, I figured I was no longer contagious. But my husband Jack had other ideas and insisted that we continue to mask and distance in the house. I wasn’t having symptoms, and I was well beyond the five days I’d read that one should isolate. So, I had an attitude—my husband was being unduly cautious, if not paranoid. Surely if he was going to get COVID from me he’d have gotten it by now.

But then something my daughter-in-law said came back to me. She was expressing how it was meaningful to her to acknowledge “what was important” for someone else. It had made an impression on me in the context of living with one’s own death, which she has been forced to do. Which she has been doing elegantly.

The Making of an Impression

By allowing the impression of what she had said to penetrate, I saw the masking/not masking issue in a different light. Yes, wearing a mask in the house was inconvenient and annoying to me after so many days. But I saw I was spilling my own negativity onto Jack, rather than seeing this as what was important to him.

Interestingly, when I registered the impression of Jack’s comfort level as more important to me than what I thought, I found a willingness to be more diligent with the mask. I could feel the tension between us diminish. And realized it wasn’t as much about whether I had the virus as it was about the exchange of energies. I had relaxed and so had he.

In this way, I was taking in impressions that were more subtle than listening to a bird singing at dawn. Yet, the impressions from what someone had said and how I had responded also involved an emotional response and an inner acceptance, a “letting go.”

In the Gurdjieff work, after physical food and air, impressions are considered the third kind of sustenance for our spiritual selves, our “higher being bodies.” Sure, we can have “canned” impressions just like we eat canned beans. However, I think most would agree that there’s more nutrition in fresh food. The equivalent would be in our awareness in receiving impressions. Making them fresh. Allowing them to enter unhindered by judgement so something can resonate and connect with our feelings.

As G.I. Gurdjieff said, “With all three centers do.”