Infrequent Visitor
I’ve been a long time away, both in reading and in writing. This is a community that I have dearly missed, and one that I’ve learned is important to my own well-being. I’m cautiously resolving to spend more regular slices of my time here. I'll also admit to a vague fear that resolving too vehemently might jinx the whole thing and leave me grumbling at myself, failing to measure up to my own standards. That being said, let me re-engage with a bit of a confession:
I feel as though the whole of me, my Aristotelian soul if you will, is a spinning cloud of bits all whizzing about some unfixed point in space. The amalgam of these myriad elements and the abstract notion of their epicenter is the hypothetical me, an aggregate identity that is perhaps more conceit than reality. I am phlegm and bile, father and child. I am my arches and my hairline, a greying beard, twinkling eyes. Parts of me are Pacific Northwest, imagination, epistemology, hospitality, wanderlust, risk management. I am my appetites, my history, my future, my loves, my passions, my foibles. I am thought, emotion, breath, and I am ever now.
The cloud of me spins, humming a complex little chord that is my contribution to the cacophony of the spheres. I am a fabric of chaos shot through with measured flashes of order: the rhythms of my body, a weather map of firing neurons, patterns of stimulus-response, layers of memory, careful disciplines of thought and emotion and perception and even creative laziness. This soul of me has added girth of late, the bits careening around slightly wider orbits than before, my cloud deceptively larger than before. This increase in diameter belies an increase in total system energy. The system of me is doing more work in being, and is subsequently creating less order.
My life is ever a busy one, and this has been perhaps the busiest season of it. My house is full, my heart is full. I’m even rediscovering some blood kin relationships that have lain long dormant. Laid atop all of this is a work life which has always had significant ebb and flow, but has recently degenerated into an uncoordinated mess that reveals deep systemic flaws well over my head. I am forced to confront that there are things at work in which I had implicitly put my faith that I now see cannot be trusted. In essence, I climbed out onto a limb, girded by a truth I had not tested, and now I find myself overextended.
Climbing back from a teetering position way out on a limb is a complicated proposition. This cloud of me doesn’t turn on a dime. It can’t. Spinning much like a gyroscope, this cloud has a significant amount of inertia to be managed. And thus my pursuit is to reestablish my equilibrium by taking measured, incremental steps back along the branch, at the same time learning how to prevent finding myself in the same predicament in the future.
I find that writing helps. Digging through my ancestry helps. Both are to me, in different ways, meditative exercises to rake the chaos of me into order. They each use different parts of my brain, my being, and I need them both. As I write this, I find my brain settling back into more familiar rhythms. I should probably follow my Aristotelian analogy the rest of the way and extend this self-therapeutic exercise to include my body, too. To shift my analogy from classical Greece to my profession, I am not only the software of my thoughts and the networking of my life. I am also the firmware of my instincts and the hardware of my body, and it really is the entirety of me that I endeavor to balance. Besides, who wants to be a pear-shaped cloud?