It takes years to say what you want to say. You feel it very often, but you just can’t say it. Sit down to write and it doesn’t show up. Talk to whoever and it just won’t come out, it evades and evades you. A part of finding it though is creating the conditions for its release: writing every day, developing habits, cultivating the feeling around this knot, or pulse, or desire.
The mind left to itself is perverse, depraved. Mean, out of touch; if anyhing antagonistic, ready to tear down who- and whatever, on account of our fears and doubts and anxieties. The idle and desperate mind would trip up and kick an old woman, our grandma, for a moment’s awkwardness or annoyance. But we forget what it’s up to, and we fall for the trick, dupes of the contortions and concoctions of our mind. It smirks and it sneers; — sometimes this jackassery even reaches our face, and it’s ugly. Ugly because mean and unnecessary, cruel.
The mind is so powerful, and sometimes I think that most of us (and I include myself of course) just can’t match it, in force or strength, and that a lot of our problems and personal riddles or dilemmas are products of the mind in us that just needs more exercise than it gets, that this excess energy becomes neurosis, and we, as Emerson says, ‘miscreate our own evils’.
Alienation plays a part too, screen time and isolation, of course of course. The news, social media, these things distort and confuse our sense of self and others, the world around us.
Most of us, I’m willing to bet — (in fact, I’m sure) —, just want to get along with the people we see every day, meet at restaurants or coffee shops, sit next to or pass at work. We’d smile and say hello, know each other’s names. Throwing down our head, pretending that the other doesn’t exist, this embarrassment about existing, depresses and annoys, is humiliating and no good for self-esteem or respect.
But it’s a struggle, and most of the time it’s only in ourselves, a battle between our heart and our head, our sense of what’s good and our fear to do it, to listen to our better thoughts or instincts and follow through, to dare.
Gray Haskins 