Enough to run around outside with my son for a few hours. We built a big sledding ramp with snow and sled down it a bunch. I also just ran around for no reason other than I felt like it.
I haven’t felt like it for many years.
I am reminded of the talk about our youthful energy returning. It’s not wrong!
This morning in the shower I pondered this phenomenon. I still hear a lot of thoughts coming through. When I am in the thought-mind, which is a particular state of mind in which my attention is very focused on thoughts, I feel that sense of energy waning. It is as if, in order to focus on thoughts, I need to redirect my youthful energy to do so. I imagine now, that this is what school is for; to train every child to redirect their youthful energy. I am reminded of my own educational philosophy; Do less. Lol. If I’m planning, scheming, scheduling. It’s a no. Do less.
The state of mind where thoughts come through, but I am not focusing my attention on them, is different. It does not require any energy. I feel at once playful and attentive. It’s also very light and joyful. I feel spontaneous and without that particular rigidity required by focused thought attention. It feels more open. Energetically open to the world; not just this world but the many in which we all live.
I experience more memories. Memories which I think I had forgotten for a long, long while. I’m not certain why these memories come up. They seem to be centered around my young adult life, and something before… But mostly young adult. There seems to be some specific or special affinity between my state right now and then.
I remember a moment. I walked out of a department store and smelled the fresh air, which seemed to buzz with energy. But more, I felt my own energy. I felt that I could run for 10 miles. I felt that I could sprint across the parking lot and then the street, and then the town, and then the country roads, all the way home. Or somewhere else. If I had wanted to.
It seemed like thought didn’t exist for me, then. Not like it does now, or rather, how it did until recently. I knew then how to not pay my full focused attention to it. In fact I think it was my natural state. As it the natural state of every child. Then we are slowly, some more than others perhaps, trained out of through coercion and fear.
Another memory came to me. I was working at TSC in a bigger city about an hour drive away. It was my first job for a corporation. I felt so out of place there. I was depressed, and anxious, self-conscious, socially awkward. Struggling to become an adult. As I was stocking a cooler, a customer came up uncomfortably close. “You’re a pretty one,” he said to me. I immediately recoiled but of course, I was working and felt like I couldn’t leave. The man stood at my counter talking to me until a manger came and helped me get him to leave.
After work, he was in the parking lot. He invited me to dinner, to which I declined and quickly got in my car and left while the manager watched him.
At the same place, a little later, another girl was hired to be cashier. She was short, stocky, homely, and not very bright. I noticed that my manager didn’t like her. The manager complained to me about her. Granted, that girl lost money all the time because she couldn’t count change properly. “I can’t believe she came in with her face like that ” the manager complained to me. I peered at the manager, then at the girl. The manager had that crummy black eyeliner which clashed horribly with her extremely fair skin and white-blond hair. The girl was plain faced. No makeup, but clean. I shrugged. “I don’t wear makeup either,” I commented. To me it seemed to be the same thing- one could not complain about one person doing the exact same thing and not the other.
“At least you’ve got some natural beauty,” the manager snapped.
I could sort of see her point, but I also felt shocked that even in a “professional” setting, she would voice such a thing so antithetical to everything I had been taught about equality in school.
I remember chatting with the girl at the cashier station during a lull period. She was dumb. And only seemed interested in the fact that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Nor even a boyfriend opportunity. “I’ve been on birth control since I was fifteen.” She told me matter-of-factly. I felt stunned. “My mom says she has to make sure I always take it.”
“She’s dumb as a box of rocks.” The manager later told me. “She can’t put 2 and 2 together, so her mother has to manage her so she doesn’t get herself pregnant.” I felt horrified. Not just by the blunt and explicit topic of the conversation, but by the implications that a girl could be so numb and animal-like that others just had to manage the consequences while she recklessly had sex with anything that walked by.
Later I walked out of work and there, in the parking lot in the semi-darkness but still clearly visible I saw that girl getting pounded in the back seat by her ‘boyfriend’. I put my head down as I walked past, as I had to, to get to my car. I felt embarrassed. I was aware of the fact that most men, or just guys at that point not necessarily men, were only into sex and nothing else. This horrified me to no end. It was not a moral horror. It was a deep visceral fear. It was a fear that crept up even during conversation about it. The prospect of facing a man, eye-to-eye, who only wanted or was interested in, or saw in me a sex object was terrifying. I’m not sure why. The very idea scared me to no end.
It did always bother me, at that time, when someone asked if I had a boyfriend. I always felt humiliation. And further anxiety and humiliation if they pressed on “are you sure you don’t have a boyfriend?” Like, yes I’m fucking sure. Why wouldn’t I know this information?
Now it seems rather sad and pitiful that I was so full of shame. There is a part of me that is utterly exhausted of all that shame. It was so heavy.
As I breathe in and recapitulate, I recognize a certain quality shift within me. It is exactly the same as the states of mind which I outlined, before. My memories become more dream-like. The emotional intensity is lessened. I breathe in all of my own soul essence which was left there, which was feeding that emotional intensity of feeling. And I breathe out all that was left within me, stuck, which does not and never did belong to me. My attention is drawn back to that quality of dreaminess. Of hearing the memory as a thought but without paying it any special attention; and an openness to the world.
Loading comments...