A Mind Divided

I’ve been unwell for awhile now.

While I enjoyed a few days respite traveling with my family, it was more a form of crisis management than a shift in mood.  Like those mothers who can lift cars off their children in an emergency, my brain shifts into some primordial survival mode when faced with a crisis.  One more thing I can’t control.

But now I’m back in the deep.  These long episodes are always a test of endurance.  I just finished watching my Firefly collection (Joss Whedon’s short-lived series about a crew of survivors in a harsh off-world future).  A bit of dialogue caught my attention.

Shepard Book: Did you ever read the works of Xiang Yu?

Simon Tam: Xiang Yu the psychotic dictator?

The Shepard: Yep.  Fancied himself quite the warrior poet.  Wrote volumes on war… torture… limits of human endurance…”

Simon: That’s nice.

The Shepard: He said—live with a man forty years, share is house, his meals, speak on every subject.  Then, tie him up and hold him over the volcano’s edge.  And on that day, you will finally meet the man.

Simon: What if you don’t live near a volcano?

The Shepard: I ‘spect he was bein’ poetical.

It got my unreliable brain thinking—am I finally meeting the real me?

And then yesterday I saw the movie Cloud Atlas.  It’s a stunning treatment of Karma, The Long Life, and the weight of our thoughts and actions.  Not only did the movie distract me from my rampaging mind, it also helped me pull focus.  I ratcheted back from internal scrutiny to a wider view of my tiny drop of water in the vast ocean of the world and how that ocean might flow over time.

I can never trust the notions that my brain spits out while I’m in the deep.  Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder if things might be changing as I meet the real me in the context of my Long Life.  Instead of fighting change, instead of trying to recreate what was, perhaps I need to relax my grip.  Instead of concentrating on the details, the minutia, perhaps a wider view is required.

I’m not sure what this means, or if I should even pay attention to it.  What I think it means today, is that I’ll stop hunting for a new coffee shop.  That sounds really petty when I write it down, but coffee shops are my sanctuaries.  The right ones can make me feel normal like nothing else can.  But the focus feels too limited now, too fear-based.  I need to look up and out.  Perhaps in all things, I need to look up and out.

I am hanging over the volcano, and maybe the true me is emerging.  But, maybe, there’s more than the fire.  Maybe, there’s also the Ocean.