08.
My meditation surprised me this morning.
What came up: how much I appreciate my unsettled soul.
Here I’ve been, attempting to anchor my being into settling habit-repetitions, sitting and breathing in this same posture in the same hard-backed chair all these mornings in a row. In doing so, I discover a grateful buzz of excitement – an excitation – which also feels unsettling.
I refuse to settle down, even as I practice meditating. So many aspects of my life function smoothly, and yet I scratch my nails against consciousness’s surfaces again and again, scraping for glimpses of what could be different. I’d always assumed this was a healthy evolutionary impulse toward constant self-improvement. Is different necessarily better, though? In asking the question, I implicitly criticize myself for the always-present hunger – more! new! exciting! different! – that keeps me from appreciating what already is, from maybe just taking it easy once in a while.
This morning, I appreciate the hunger, too, in a new way: Creativity is born from not being willing to accept what already is. Why else create something new? Why reach for an unfamiliar and potentially destabilizing experience, if not for its creative potential?
I’ve always been skeptical (if not envious) of creative types who claim they must create, they have no choice, they’ll otherwise die. I’ve never felt such things myself, or so I thought. And then I imagine my days as an endless repetition of all the same activities which supposedly make me happy, and I flinch.
My age has gifted me a calmer enjoyment of the simple daily pleasures. I’ve loyally committed to tending my bodily needs, my mental well-being, my emotional safety. Yet, too much commitment still feels like a trap. I crave the radical freedom to do whatever I want, and I’m lucky enough to believe that I can. This freedom may be more precious to me than anything else. This contrast brings meaning to each extreme. I enjoy the everyday only because periodically I rip it from my life, drop myself in proverbial jungle, and feel my way through.
Writing is like this, too: a regular practice, repeating a posture and physical action, and yet you never know what’ll come out of you once you take the plunge and sit down and do it.
I hit a lull, lose my train of thought, and go past the point of hoping I’ll make some cogent point. This walk includes a detour. I’m on edge, unprepared to meet whatever’s up around the bend or rising in the next paragraph. I stare out the window at the tree while words show up on the screen: more typos, but less tracking of ideas as they emerge.
Catastrophe lurks over the shoulder, a grotesque courting of mutation. I too might have my skull crushed by a heavy falling object. At any time, someone could bust in through all this glass, whether or not I lock the door, and carry out unspeakable acts. Do we really believe a stable routine prevents these fates from having their way with us?
I invite the unsettling by talking about that which you wish to avoid. I adore a cliché gone wrong, a line heard so many times you’re already chirping along before I go off-pitch and roughly insert foreign seed. I disrupt the arrangement. I eat dirt off the ground to keep from dying of too clean a system. (That’s how I can digest whatever you put in my food.) I might just love what I used to hate, pissing you off by crimping your power to know me reliably. How’s that for unsettling?
To create is to understand the next utterance I produce could cause you to hate me for what I’ve pulled from my hat. You might’ve caught a glimpse inside before the trick began, but nothing could prepare you for this. Lights drop. Drum kicks in. Many-colored handkerchiefs spew forth. Unsuspecting audience members, lacking black plastic trash-bags to use as shields, are splashed with guts. This is a horror show they won’t easily forget.
Because the book’s not written yet, uncertainty’s a most prolific gift, the imminent end looms large, every new day’s sentence a dare to burst out in flesh-chunks, wet mess getting everywhere, the smell of ghosts, and stains which may never come out, I look around for more things to say.
the in-between*
© 2020 Barry Perlman