You'd think I'd be more gung-ho about something that's dominated much of my life, but being detached has some awesome benefits. One good thing off the top of my head is that I know I'm probably not getting mislead because I'm plowing through resources for verifications. I know I haven't overexposed myself to the point that my memories are muddied and I don't know which end is up. Another good thing is that past life stuff is less likely to take over my current life, which happens quite a bit to people. I've definitely had times, large chunks of my life, where I couldn't move past the war and my preoccupation with the era/loneliness had me living in my own private Idaho for longer than I'd like to admit.

Detachment is also great for leaving the door open if one happens to be wrong. The way I see it, if one small memory is incorrect or a detail isn't plausible, then maybe another one isn't as well...if I get enough small things incorrect, then maybe a few of those biggies will be wrong, like a domino effect. I'm not necessarily LOOKING to be wrong (and actually I've committed the ultimate reincarnation faux pas of being too confident. Twice. Once on a mailing list eons ago, where I said reincarnation was a FACT. Yuppers, I used the F-word.  More recently, it was in an email and I said, 'I KNOW I'M RIGHT.' We all know you're not supposed to say things like this, because the more flexible you seem, the more people will take you seriously. (But c'mon, most of the people preaching this would be flat out pissed if you challenged them on their own claims and in all probability wouldn't take it gracefully.)  I think it's partly being still embarrassed that I believe in reincarnation and that I'm one of 'those people' who believe they've had an FPL. On top of that, I'm not exactly bursting with fruit flavor about everything that went on back then, so keeping that detachment alive and a window open to be wrong just feels a helluva lot more comfortable.

The past year and a half or so, I've been lazily buttoning up a few things I remembered. If I have time on the computer without being happily distracted by real life or by websites like "dogshaming.com" and am in the correct mood, I'll check a few things out. Again, it's not something burning in my belly that I HAVE to know that very second, and usually they're random details like a style of a woman's jacket in 1908, a type of tree, the layout of a park/home/building, or technological tidbits that remember but hadn't necessarily proved the existence of. Each time, whatever I remembered was real, had existed, and I would get a sinking feeling in my stomach. I don't have an overbearing amount of guilt going on on my end, so I am not sure why I get so weird. 

Maybe it's because I'm just waiting to be wrong. I'd love to have something come up that gave me doubts, but I'm telling you, it has never come. Not once. And I'm not talking about the big stuff I've verified...I'm talking about those little details, the filler stuff, a lot of it pre-1918, that proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I lived in those times. 

Last month, my fiancee and I attended a spring concert in a church where a colleague of hers was singing. All the songs were accompanied only by a beat up piano, so it was nothing too glitzy. About an hour into the show, two young ladies sang a duet. About 10 seconds into it, I froze because I KNEW the song. All of it, pretty much the whole piece, and as I explained afterwards, it was like I had heard it a hundred times. I asked her if she knew the song. She said no. I even asked again because I couldn't imagine why it was so familiar to me, yet not to her...my practical side assumed it was just a common song that was somehow bringing tears to my eyes for some dumb reason, completely unrelated to past lives.
Yeah, there was definitely an emotional response present. I'd never had that reaction from a piece of music before, especially some little melody plonked out basically on an old church piano, and I wondered if it was past life related somehow. We asked her friend after the show and he said the name. Never heard of it in my life up until then. I got home, looked it up, and it was a part of an opera from the 1880s that enjoyed quite a bit of success before the First World War (and probably after as well, but I don't have a source for that). Had I heard it a hundred times? Hah, I don't know, but it looks like I heard it a lot...or at least enough to remember it sitting in a little church in South America in 2012.

Two Mondays ago, I decided on a hunch to check out another memory...one of those I've had forever and were amongst the pile of stuff that never fit this life that I started working through as an 8th grader. I've always been stumped about this memory because it takes place in a house that reminded me of a neighbor's (in this life). Nothing really stood out in this memory except my height (usually a big indicator in my memories that I had mixed up into this life's stash as a small child), the fact that I'm not with a guardian while waiting uneasily in some older person's front room (another indicator I use), and that outside the house grapes were growing. Lots of them. I grew up in a rural area, but not a vineyard, so the fact that I remembered a vineyard didn't make sense. The rest of the location and the memory itself seemed a bit off as well, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you where I was, in ANY life, because so many things just didn't add up to me, common sense-wise. There shouldn't be a vineyard there, if this was from a past life...yet there was. 

So when Monday came around, I finally pulled up my britches and made a Google search on the only place I could imagine where I would of been, where I know I had been around the time I felt I was in the memory, though it was a city and, again, it made zero sense that I remember a vineyard there. And, yeah...this particular European city indeed has vineyards within its city limits, has for centuries, and all the other little details of this boring-as-hell memory now fit. It's totally plausible that this happened, even if I only took the vineyard bit out of it and, at this time, I have to accept that this memory is probably from my past life. Or, at least, accept that there is enough to dig a little more if I can or am willing to tackle it.

Why can't something just come along that is so preposterous that I can put it away for good? Why does every single weird thing fit? Why am I even still surprised when all this stuff pans out? Why am I even bartering with myself on this at all, especially at this point? Do I accept it...or do I not?