Maybe the mind doesn’t just move on through time.

It gets heavier, with more and more layers of memory, habit, tendency, grudge, aversion.

An acquired unconscious.

A head with invisible but ever-growing complex and heavy antlers.

Or maybe barnacles on the hull of a ship– barnacles upon barnacles.

A little more added every year– more to haul up the stairs.

Gradually and invisibly attached

and often serving some purpose.

(My friend suggests that the purpose is this: Dying is the deal we accept because we can’t take the weight of the barnacles and antlers anymore. I say maybe. I think that does happen, but it’s not that simple or always inevitable. We address those acquisitions in different ways through life: introspection and meditation, psychoanalysis, acknowledgement and release, Alzheimers, drugs, medicine– various ways we might shed or change the relationship. Oblivion is not that simple.)

Anyway, that’s not what I mean by purpose.

I mean accruing the barnacles or the branches of the antlers is natural and gradual

and in each instance happens for  some reason, often small.

The way you do things, think of things, react to things, day by day.

When those days are many, rather than few.

–Ken Weathersby