Think for a second about your fingernails…
Do you find they grow far quicker than your toenails?
Well, this was a conversation that I heard about 20 years ago on a radio show hosted by Steve Wright in the afternoon. And he is right, I seem to cut my toenails about half as much as my fingernails. But what has happened along the way is this…I now have an ‘anchored association’ between his original conversation about toenails and my own toenail cutting i.e. every time I cut my nails I think of Steve Wright.
It makes me wonder whether anyone else listening to the show has the same experience, and whether Steve Wright himself does too? I doubt it. Yet here I am with a whole conversation ‘attached’ to the cutting of some dead cells, bringing a visual mental life to an otherwise dull event.
We don’t live in a world devoid of attachment, but so often the attachment lives in a matrix of memories that exist just below a threshold of recognition.