We are more than we think
"What you can plan
is too small
for you to live."
- David Whyte
In her dreams she is waking, but on waking she finds the city still gleaming with the surreal. Beneath her apartment, people rush past in an endless stream of busy, locked into screens, plugged into headphones, minds planning out the next moment before the next moment.
She
makes coffee to go. Dresses into the uniform of her days. Ties the black laces
of her shoes. Walks the two blocks to the bus station, pressing with the
crowds. Sits on the bus nursing her coffee, warm against her fingers. The bus
jolts through the tarred arteries of the concrete high-rise. Inside she
is already breaking. It's not yet 8:30am.
Illustrations by Kate Gillett |
In
her dreams, the buildings are
collapsing. Great skyscrapers
returning to the sea. A corner of the scene curls, flaps in the breeze. Its
just a projection on a screen, threatening now to peel away. Her own body is strangely membraneless, her atoms coming apart. They slide into the collapsing
building, into the space between them, tumbling with oxygen and dust. Deeper
still they stream together, light and dark, building a humming river. She slips
into the stream. She is everything and nothing. Flowing, living water.
But
now the bus has lurched to a halt at the hospital, and there are personalities
to meet and be.
Good-Morning-Theresa-and-how-is-the-wedding-planning-Anna-yes-of-course-I-will-cover-your-ward-Joe.
She
goes up into the running buzz of wards and rounds, meetings and patients. Words
fizz froth all around. A patient plans his 18-hour workday tomorrow, the day
after his heart attack. His words are disconnected from his eyes, his skin, his
scent. He is leaking fear and despair. Professionals whir in; spew forth drug
schedules and lifestyle advice. They
plan all the ways for this not to
happen. Plan so much that it never did happen. Is not happening.
There
is only a single moment in the busy day when the earth suddenly opens: A friendless old woman, her sixth visit to the
hospital in less months. She is desperately alone, and all out of fight. All out of plans. She does not know how
to go on, and the hospital would like her to go on home. Today.
The
women sit together, young with old. They do not plan the going on. They do not
speak. They sit in the thick of it. Feel the pain weighing the moment. Silently
they tap a thin spile into their conjoined presence and spill forth the only
renewing resource: wordless, abiding love. Compassion streams around them, two
women with hearts cracked open.
It
is the only thing that makes the day enough. The rest is madness.
The
present day is mostly lost. The planning of the mind pulls everyone forward
into the day to come, the patient discharge targets to be met, the holiday on
the horizon, the possible catastrophe awaiting tomorrow. The mind excels in
planning; the future is its own autocratic dominion. A confabulated kingdom
that never exists but steals from the real erupting present. Trapped forever in
the fictional future, we are trapped in our minds.
On
the bus ride home, she reads in a newspaper of a woman, Marquis, walking nations
alone. She walks months and months across the Nullarbor in Australia and the
expanse of Siberia. She walks because after days and days something happens.
“The past and present
telescope down to an all-consuming now. ‘There is no before or after. The
intellect doesn’t drive you anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore. You become what
nature needs you to be: this wild thing.’”
But
for the young woman of our story, it is her dreams that are creaking. While the
intellect sleeps, the Deep whispers to a Heart wide enough to feel the width of
the universe. The cities collapse and in its void, the infinite
expands.
The instinct that comes for her has no name, no reason, no explanation. Cannot stay, cannot stay. It is by instinct that she acts. And why not? The alternative to instinct is to trust in the limits of a ruminating mind.
In hospital corridors, they said she torched her entire life in one go. Rode a wave (hope she likes where it dumps her). She fled like a refugee, shedding everything: the good marriage, the good job, the good investment home. A city collapsing. They said it was unreasonable and inexplicable.
And it was.
The instinct that comes for her has no name, no reason, no explanation. Cannot stay, cannot stay. It is by instinct that she acts. And why not? The alternative to instinct is to trust in the limits of a ruminating mind.
In hospital corridors, they said she torched her entire life in one go. Rode a wave (hope she likes where it dumps her). She fled like a refugee, shedding everything: the good marriage, the good job, the good investment home. A city collapsing. They said it was unreasonable and inexplicable.
And it was.
There was no explanation and no reason.
But we are more than the limits of our mind.
But we are more than the limits of our mind.
The mind is too small for what we are. Life happens faster than the speed of thought. By the time we have conceptualized what we are and what we’re doing, we’ve already done it, been it and are onto something new.
Beyond the mind lies our animal self. Mineral, elemental, earth, fire, water, inseparable atoms from the earth’s crust and the seas that birth us. The mind, limited by language and pulled out of the real into the fictional, forgets everything that the body remembers. Everything that language will never explain. Everything beyond the mind’s imagination.
The
mind is not up to the task of living.
So she abandons herself; her mind as it knows herself, the identities, the roles, the plans, the goals, all the fictional future. She lets it go, unraveling like a spool of thread. She is not what she has done, or read, achieved or possessed.
So she abandons herself; her mind as it knows herself, the identities, the roles, the plans, the goals, all the fictional future. She lets it go, unraveling like a spool of thread. She is not what she has done, or read, achieved or possessed.
All fixed milestones removed, she walks out in unmapped directions. Becomes the wild thing. Stretches her legs, so she can feel the skin, the muscle, the bone, moving against gravity. She hears her pulse singing through blood vessels, breath echoing in lungs. Tastes the saliva in her month.
She wants to swim in the stream of living water and her thoughts cannot take her there.
“One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of reacting, is because we are continually stifling out deepest impulses.”
- Henry Miller.
Quote about Marquis from Elizabeth Weil, International
New York Times, Chasing an inexplicable feeling,
Sept 27-28 2014, p. 2
And here too: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/magazine/the-woman-who-walked-10000-miles-no-exaggeration-in-three-years.html?_r=0
And here too: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/magazine/the-woman-who-walked-10000-miles-no-exaggeration-in-three-years.html?_r=0
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