quiet rivers

When one day seems like the day before, when those everyday demands that we face and overcome become so routine they might as well be a blur, the organism — recognizing a certain unexplained discomfort in such a robotic rendering of daily living — resorts to doing the same things with methodical intent; the slow and exact positioning of a chair in front of the computer, the perfect alignment of the reading lamp over the keyboard, the sorting-out of thoughts inside the mind…as if the deliberate slowing-down of both physical and mental activity might contribute towards keeping a sense of “adventure” ( for lack of a better word ) in its existence. For most of us, purpose — or the sense of it — is ever an exercise in focus; or it essentially becomes, out of inertia, a lost cause.

Tonight, like I’ve done the past few nights, I sat down in front of my computer. I sat in the dark, stared through the unlighted screen and out the window. The unidentifiable shadows in the darkness outside invited lethargy, offering diffusion, as it were, as an ointment for the grind of the day just passed. Tonight, and all-too slowly, I sensed that those shadows wove configurations that beckoned memories far more closer than they should. Then…

I suddenly remembered I never did get to turning the computer on…the night before last night…the one before that. I had slumped back to my chair, my eyes traveling beyond their own sight of night-shadows to times back, times almost forgotten.

Some days, while your pulse grows faster and weaker and your breath grows more labored, life goes by like a blur.

Until last night, that is. I was actually able to post something last night, before my eyelids became too heavy to keep open. Until tonight, when the almost-automatic movement towards the monitor wasn’t halted by the sense of indifference that had lately enfolded my soul, eroded my will to even write; let alone, speak. Tonight, and yes, the night before, I had tried to exert effort into my smallest movements…tried to inject deliberation.

“If you stare at a wall long enough, the wall disappears,” explains Dan Fineman, a professor of English and comparative literary studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Likewise, a phrase reiterated endlessly loses its original meaning — and sometimes all meaning whatsoever.

It’s about “habituation,” Fineman adds. “Even a complex object, if it doesn’t get moved around, becomes status quo.”

I have enmeshed my life in habits that are slow in dying, slower still to kill, slowest to overcome. Enmeshed it in humdrum passivity until I’d almost forgotten even to wonder if I’d ever really lived at all, ever really loved.

Need. I need to have a purpose every day, to get through it. I need to remind myself of it at sunset-time, if only to renew it come the next sunrise. I need my life…

Alive.

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