Nose to the wall

The cold comfort of contemplation

I often think every human is inherently bipolar. That we are inflicted with some sort of dual personality. Jekyll and Hyde. I constantly colliding neurosis with ourselves. Sometimes, we grow weary of dancing a stagnant dance.

Happy and spry one moment

The contours of our beings and souls in alignment with whatever we draw power from.

The world is our oyster, and nobody can convince us otherwise.

Then, inexplicably-it ends.

You get tired. You know where the wizard is hiding behind the curtain. You grow weary of his tricks. You become, aggravated, suspicious.

Too wise for the wear as to the comings and goings of your fellow men.

Like a woman who knows that her lover is stepping out on her in favor of someone else, but doesn’t have the energy to put up the fight. She goes through the motions, silently acquiescing to the rendezvous.

Yet for some reason, we still force ourselves to do this tricky dance we are told to keep dancing. We don’t stop and ask why. We don’t take a pause. We don’t heed or recollect and if we do it’s in some surface level way-performing on autopilot.

When I was a little kid, there was no mark of shame worse than being sent to the corner. Being a scrappy Leo and decidedly mouthy and outspoken even then, I hated being silenced and shunned.

But time and time again there I stood in full view of the classroom my nose to the corner, my mouth silenced, listening to the giggles and murmurings of people who I thought were my friends.

Looking back I wonder what it was that I hated so much about that time. The fact that it was forced upon me? The humiliation of being forcibly silenced?

It’s amazing how we fight and rebel against a timeout when we’re kids, but as we get older it’s all we can do to steal a stray moment for ourselves. Fortunately sometimes the universe does that for us.

Life has a tendency to buffet us one too many times and instinctively we retreat.

You haul up.

Flee to sanctity of your sheets. The guilty pleasures of comfort foods and comfort sensations. Movies you won’t tell anybody you like. Books that are like old friends.

Is this a sad feeling? Or necessary one?

There seems to be a lot of incentive to pontificate simply for its own sake sometimes.

I often take the burn out of these moments by telling myself it’s simply “gathering of momentum”.

A pattern, really. Any manic time in life is usually going to have some sort of stagnant predecessor.

Perhaps it simply part of the flow, intent to unknowingly dance this dance until the universe blesses us with a kinked foot a light flu or some small reason to stay put. Only then are we allowed to examine the narrative of our journey up to this point.

So, you know what? Do it. Embrace the stagnation. Flip it. Alchemize it into contemplation.

After all , when a man knows where the tiger is hiding, he won’t view the jungle the same way.

-Something that kid in the corner is still learning.