Member-only story
On Consciousness
Fainting and Fallibility
Imagine you’re in a grocery store — your local, familiar spot with a list and plenty of time. You’re picking through the green beans when the floor drops, the earth ceases to turn, or maybe picks up speed. Your heart races, your throat tightens, a chill creeps quickly from your feet to your face. Sounds change — the common chorus of a food-shopping crowd becomes a tinny, clanging jumble, jarring and garbled. Light and movement is suddenly visual overload. You feel that you must run, but perhaps it’s safer to sink, in case you fall. What if this dizzy madness causes a blackout and you pass out, again? Right there, by the beans, for everyone to see.
Most of us take consciousness for granted, like breathing. We breathe, in and out, all day and hardly give it a thought, just as we wake each morning and count on the seemingly simple fact of consciousness. We don’t will it or work on it, we expect it and are never really in fear of losing it. Like the rising sun, day in and day out. But what if you can’t count on it, or don’t feel as if you can? What does life look like then?
Back to the beans. You assemble your face and limbs into what you imagine mimics any other shopper and find a relatively quiet corner by the organic juice, a niche where you can sit on the floor (not exactly mimicking any other shopper, but it’s the best…
