just observe, do nothing
sunday post
hi cuties if you’re reading this I love you lots and am grateful for your presence in my life! A belated Navroz Mubarak and Ramadan Kareem, and happy Succession eve to those who celebrate.
For me every year Jan-March are for percolation of whatever growth related items I’m looking to bring into my life and then from March onwards, I’ve thought about things enough to possibly act on them. In terms of a life update: I have been in my spiritual bimbo era i.e. a prolonged period of purgatory where I moved out, stopped reading (barely hyperbole), went to vipassana, felt extremely lonely, went on a long pilgrimage and generally began to question my entire life trajectory (turning 27 amirite). I am happy to announce I am re-entering a passionate, literary era with just a smidge less judgement and rage in my heart (merci Mathew).
I regret accidentally turning my finsta/private journal/best friends space into the account I sometimes give to random people I when I am too drunk to remember not to, because that means I can no longer post my diary on the internet. In the end I decided that sharing is important for group witnessing, personal archive, improvement, etc. so thank you for coming <3 these are pieces of the past few months I’d like to keep, in no chronological order.
I am addicted to tension, to information, to control – I am lying to myself when I say I was fine in an incubator. Of course we live and breathe because of incubators, but its the getting to the other side, to the light outside, that has always kept me moving. I cant touch it, but with eyes closed I could imagine. Soles of the feet, palms of the hand. There are pressure points to pull me away from dreamland and into this dull, sick, reality. That is what intensity does to you: it washes out everything else.
Gabi discusses symbols. You build a lexicon of your own, and the best stories (you think) work off existing ones to build a new shared shorthand. This is how we have always worked: making your own little maps to explain the world as it were. The stand-ins are several degrees of change from the originals; too many cyphers lost to arrive at the same meaning twice. there is beauty in this incongruence; little secrets are just for you, just for here and now. When you bask in this light, the light off the cusp of the future, you cheat death over and over.
When you wash with acid you pick up the pieces, you’re left with salt and water. the bad just gets worse, moods turn into hexagonal symbols you tattoo on your tender, unbroken skin to date yourself. Overshoot and you’ll burn, overshoot and you dry out – In the overwash, you cling to bits of intensity and lose the ability to imagine the spaces between, around, outside, beyond. The salts remind you of your wounds, remind you that you live and breathe. Microdose your wellness, balance your endeavours. A steady hand will take you far but an overzealous intensity can’t compensate for your many misdemeanors. If you were tasked with creating the town proverbs, your philosophy would surely be washed away with you, no one left to decipher those cryptic forms.
If you flood yourself with enough information and sunlight, you might emerge with a clarified silhouette that is somewhat opaque; you fill yourself slowly and purge the parts you don’t like quickly. It isn’t so simple, seeing the parts you don’t want and executing a separation. To your chagrin, your views on love, morality, and kindness in practice are in shambles – we lie to ourselves constantly, 27 is opening yourself to the possibilities that you are always lying to yourself, embracing the reality of your own dishonesty. I’ve always been terrified of funhouses and jumpscares, your own reflection lurking around the next corner. In retrospect, blatant honesty was hiding in plain sight (you close your eyes to all you don’t want to recognize), you leave trails of your wounds as they open and close which you tell yourself are indications for slow healing, a testament to the need to slow and rest and to the baby steps along the way. if you had a birds eye view you’d maybe be able to trace how you went; but you don’t desire this anymore, tracing a trajectory can’t stop the bleeding.
I’ve been back 23 days; 3 weeks and 2 days of not quite meditating daily- a traumatic cleanse that fades to grey with the coming and going of days. The tide does her own thing, we like the moments where the sand is just wet, barely a trace of you standing there. Water fills you and flows through you and undoes you and you’re still completely dry – dried out skin, hair, eyes, heart – its a race against yourself to quenching in this iced furnace. I write tired little metaphors to myself and get sucked into whatever the algorithm wants me to drown in, I could stay there for days. The things you tell yourself are neither novel nor your own; the algorithm needs you to know that whatever you feel Sylvia Plath invented first; there are no forks, only fig trees. She is dead from willing herself into an oven, and you are still listening to Lana Del Rey.
Progress ebbs and flows like this; anything I learned needs to find her way back to me to stick. The anxiety of disconnection exists with or without a physical break from your cellphone and everyone you love – having the semblance of control removed breaks you down; but you realize now that you’d break anyways. I used to like to tell myself I would lay down and die in the apocalypse; simple accepting my fate. I realize now this is not entirely true- when prompted I will run and keep running, run when there is nowhere to go.
the aesthetics of being online shift, no one is who they say they are anymore. who you say you are is what people will believe; we favour mental shortcuts. we no longer speak each others’ languages, we aren’t there to discuss, simply to observe. there is no meditative quality to being online; observation exists alongside judgement and judgement burrows deep into our veins. to root it out takes time, a detox, a rejection of the hits that are fewer now, a movement away from a need to know what we’d otherwise miss.to live in the real world takes real effort, to decide being happy is more important than being smart feels like a Difficult Decision. there is an illusion of sharp forks presented to you over and over, a middle way is a unicorn. a middle way speaks like a therapist fed through an internet robot and fact checked for accuracy, a middle way looks like something with dull edges that fades into its’ surroundings. i am searching for a middle way that does it all, she retains everything, she is everything. she emerges full of light that doesn’t need dimming, she knows who she is again, she is where she is and that’s that.
just observe, do nothing.
here we are again one year later, watching a sunrise over the desert but with a quieter, sadder heart. i turned off my brain for longer, hoping to just exist, just watch, just see where we come out without doing anything. living in the world involves doing; you have to give yourself time and spaces for observation, for doing nothing. i am tired of fighting reality and in succumbing i start to lose parts of myself, start to notice parts i didn’t realize were there. start to notice the ways life will pan out if you aren’t brave, notice them with less urgency. the sky changes fast, if you aren’t watching, it’ll be a different place in a moments time. if you are watching, it’ll look the same but feel different, and you won’t know why.
~friends
We are in motion, a dynamic system of waves that crash and crest, align and then fall out of step, on our own time until we meet again. if i could meet you again, i’d tell you about the way the light bounced off your edges, how i admired your carefree force, the clarity and ease you embody. i wished you’d sweep me away with your tide, away from the murky waters inbetween the safety of the shore and the depths of the open water. on other days, we match pace and drift parallel – i am grateful for a shared pace amongst friends, no need to explain the pull I feel because you feel it too. This system is sacred and to be respected, distinct from the oscillating planets I observe in orbit, these bodies bound by a central star and not truly by each other. the way of water has no beginning and no end. the sea is around you and in you. our hearts beat in the womb of the world. this is complete nonsense if you really stop to think about it, but we’ll forgive anything that looks or sounds the right way if it means we can soothe our own disquiet.
As a palate cleanse or accompaniment (LOL) here are some tunes for your pleasure: