There was one day I took a walk far from town, and managed to lose myself on a trail which had developed from the local roads. It felt like one frequently used by just one or a few, though I had no clear reason for thinking this. I never saw another soul there. I presumed it was a private trail, someone’s silent habit I was an intruder along. This perhaps a rationalization of an unaddressed feeling I always carried, that I was a trespasser in this world. With the clarity of distance, I recognize this feeling forms the backdrop of my entire lived experience. This feeling of trespassing was not particular to that quiet trail. It was in the absence of other feelings that I’d uncovered its everpresent hum.
This way of thinking about feelings and long thoughts has trapped my mind in its middle years. I have such a frustration with language, how words in small numbers pierce right through truths they seek to secure, straight through to the other side, blasting through the breach in such a rush to blitz any and all opposing forces. Words of today are under intense economic pressure. Brevity has feasted to brawny fat off its victories, and there’s little room for whatever else. I don’t know how to fix this. But I believe nothing important should ever be timed by an elevator.
I used to think when someone is angry it happens like an event, with a start, an end, and a painful duration between. After a few decades of observation, I now recognize that like Disney’s Hulk, people who are angry are always angry. People who are sad are always sad. It’s just that most people have so many feelings, and so loud these feelings, that they cannot feel them all. So over-stimulated, most people are feeling most things, all the time, not even recognizing it, all of it unchambered ammunition. (I’m definitely overgeneralizing but.) You’re all emotionally constipated in my eyes.
What is it about emotions that they must have their day in the sun? Therapy is like corralling a wildebeest. You must trot it out and take it through all its proper paces afore it will deign to take its leave of you. Crammed factory farms are an apt metaphor for the modern emotional state. Economy of language and economy of story, of drama, is now efficient enough to infiltrate even the most distracted mind. There’s so much product crammed into each person, and these products are of such fine breeding, that the person’s own feelings are passed over by the panel. We have a real treat for you today, a newcomer to the field, not yesterday’s news, what do we have here folks.
Small days have gone by and I cannot stem the font of feelings. Are the feelings not fading, or are they being renewed? Repress, exult, analyze, disclose, nothing cures. Always stepping away from others, from myself, a mariner hopelessly searching for a still pond at sea. Patiently awaiting the night of the single star, to cross into its inviting sky. Lonely at baseline, by birthright. One day I walked up a mountain, another day down a highway. There is always that moment (perhaps of weakness) when I turn and think. Now then. I suppose it’s time to go back.
saltednotion 