Dear yous,
Good morning from 4:30 AM on a Thursday. I've been waking up pretty early the past few days, feeling somewhat active, so I figured I'd make good use of the time and write.
I had a moment of contemplating whether it is worth me to continue this blog. Or whether it's worth it to write altogether. I had a 1001 variations on the thought "I'm worthless."
I could go with that thought - I've done it before with other things - and that usually leads to depression. When I suppress myself, when I don't communicate or don't speak out of a fear of not being heard, then I'm not in a good way. If I follow the thought "I do not belong here. I have no place here," then my world will transform into one that has no space for me...or one in which I can find no space.
In this spaceless world, when I walk I feel like I'm constantly bumping into people. My shoulders are too wide. The sense that I have of my body is not always what my body is in physical reality. When I speak, no one listens. Sometimes the environment works to make this so. I'll be speaking with someone, trying to say something of meaning, and something external will interrupt, with consistency. It's like no one pays attention long enough for me to say what I'm trying to say. I'm able to make words and sounds but they are disconnected. It's like my timing is off. It's all timing, really.
If I'm in my flow, if my life is moving to a nice rhythm and things are flowing, I can see the timing of things. I can see the gaps between people on the sidewalk where I will walk. I can see all obstacles in my way, so to speak.
If my timing is off, I can't see a route anywhere. I am stuck. Life is a wildly complex, massive moving stream of people and cars and survival needs and who the fuck can really navigate this anyway? That's how it feels. In this state, I can't access that realm of myself that feels things emotionally, so I say things that are indirectly related to how I'm feeling. I can get stuck in the mundaneness of the shitty side of existence: rote motions, food in food out, say this to get that.
I exist. I know this to be true. I wake up every day. I eat. I sleep. I do all the normal human things.
If I am fully engaged in the present moment, then my sense of separate self is dissolved in it. I am moving with the wave of the present moment. There is motion happening, but no separate sense of "I."
The moment "I" am doing the thing in the present moment, then my experience is no longer directly of the present moment, of the sensations happening, feelings, thoughts, motions, smells, all of the "hard problem of consciousness" qualia - my experience is removed from the present moment by the thought of myself experiencing the moment; I'm experiencing what is happening in reality through the filter of thought, which categorizes and filters the experience I'm having, the experience my body is having in this moment, according to past experience. This filtering, I've found, is ultimately illusory. All that mental stuff can play out and at the end of the day I'm still sitting here right where I find myself.
I take this moment to be fundamental. I look around and I can see that motion is happening. The motion of my fingers on the keyboard. I cough. There are thoughts. My face is scrunched as I do sometimes when I write. My cats are half-sleeping, breathing in and out. And every so often, and this is perhaps my favorite thing about Philly, I can hear the calm whine of the Septa busses as they drive down Broad St. amid the quiet predawn.
So in this moment I, that is the totality of me, including my body, my thoughts and feelings, can either be aligned with the what is happening or not aligned. When I am aligned with the moment, there is flow. When I am misaligned, there is obstacle. The only observable difference in myself between the two poles is timing. This leads me to believe that we're dealing with waves here!! Let me explain.
If I'm sitting at a red light, about to make a left turn, I'll probably have my blinker on. Usually, the cars in front of me will have their blinkers on, too. If the rate that my blinker flashes is close to the rate of the blinker of the car in front of me, I'll see my blinker and their blinker align for a moment, then drift apart....they'll be opposite at a point - mine on, theirs off, vice versa - then they'll drift back together until the light turns green. I'm talking here about phase.
In terms of car blinkers, we're talking about two things being related to each other by timing. The moment that the person in front of me turns on their blinker + the moment that I turn on my blinker + the rate of our respective blinkers = how in sync or how out of sync I will perceive our blinkers to be.
I take it that life is a very complex version of that.
The moment is fundamental. I have some independence of motion in this moment via my thoughts and physical body motions but regardless of what transpires out there or in here, I am always this body in this moment.
If I can only control this body and I can only ever be aligned with what is happening now, out of line with what is happening now, or some degree in between, then it can be said that I'm either in phase with the moment or out of phase with it.
When we're talking about timing and phase and rate, then we're talking about wave functions. In my experience, I've found that viewing life as a giant complex wave feels true. When I am aligned with this wave, then I'm flowing with it. There is no separate "I" to struggle against anything.
So back to the thought of "I'm worthless, why do I do anything." That's just a thought. It's a powerful one, but it's still just a thought that arises and dissipates over time. Is that thought any more or less true than any other distinct thing I can point to in my consciousness?
And, also, as far as communicating, I need to do it. I need to share myself. And so far, I've found this blog to be a satisfactory outlet. At the end of the day I'm doing this for myself. I write this for myself, both so I can communicate in the moment, but also so that I document my journey through some complex trauma and mental stuff. The words are there and in the words and the timing of the posts is the underlying story, the feeling, the thing I'm trying to say. And maybe others will stumble across this and find some value, some recognition in the expression.
With love,
Casey
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