Another week has passed, another two days away from the office to recharge my batteries.
Oddly enough, weekends are usually when I feel I get the most done. I generally work on homework, projects, and other crap that must be completed. Errands, projects, tasks, and other associated hilarity (a.k.a., drivel).
Not this weekend.
After the week(s) that I’ve had, I needed to simply… live. So, for two days, I let the rest of the world go on without me for a while, and enjoyed myself. Now, I’m sitting up at IHOP regretting not getting anything done, including all of the homework I need to complete.
But, it can wait. My health, including mental, emotional, and physical, is more important.
I’m having to continually remind myself that the world will not end if I miss a homework assignment, if I fail to meet a deadline at work, even if I fail to take care of one of the thousand tasks and errands that I need to do.
The funny thing? As I’m writing this, my mind is simultaneously prioritizing a list of tasks that I need to complete. I need to do my state income taxes, I need to complete my renewal FAFSA, I have homework for my VB class, I’ve got a project in my ERP class, I…
I need to just breathe.
Funny how I forget to do that sometimes. Fortunately, my Peripheral Nervous System keeps pretty good tabs on respiration, expiration, persperation, exhalation, evacuation, and countless other little actions, processes, and subroutines (Sweet Jesus, I sound like a programmer…) for me, in case I forget.
But, with all of the systems and controls (TSR programs?) running in the background that allow me to focus on my higher functions, I still have to take time every now and then and just ignore my sentience, my awareness of self.
It is these times that I just… breathe.
I listen to my heartbeat. I pay attention to the little noises that we almost always tune out, to prevent an aural overload. I notice the way the cool Oklahoma night wind feels as it gushes over my skin, normally ignored as thousands of touch receptors fire in a perfect blend of orchestrel life. I allow my mouth to salivate as I detect the presence of bovine muscle fibers cooking on a grill at my next door neighbor’s house. I tamp down the instinctual force to run up, grab the hunk of meat off the piece of burning metal, and sneak off into the night like some thieving predator. Instead, I allow my neighbor’s spoken greeting of friendship to fill my emotional well with appreciation, and even joy. I return the greeting in my usual way, forming growls, clicks, and other seemingly random intonations into a form of primitive language that makes sense to our glob of neurons called a brain.
And, for a brief moment of pure, utter lucidity, the world makes perfect, indelible sense, and my soul fills with the one emotion that few in this world attain for more than a handful of individual moments: contentment.
I try to have a perfect moment at least once every single rotation of the Earth about it’s axis. Most people, I believe, may go their entire lives without this feeling. These simplistic biochemical reactions that we have so poorly termed “life” are far too numerous for most people to even notice they exist, let alone for an entire, single moment.
In that moment, our bodies are a cacophony of activity, as neurons fire, muscle cells strain, sensory organs latch onto an odor, or a sound, or a glimmer, or a brush against the skin, analyze it, and report it to the brain for action, reaction, reflex, or short-term or long-term storage.
Learning how to live, is to learn what to ignore, simply put.
Newborns seem to have a sense of unadulterated wonder about them. Although I don’t remember being one myself, I can only assume that this wonderment exists because they have not yet learned how to discard 99% of the reams of data coming from every facet of their physical forms, as we have trained ourselves, or perhaps forgotten, how to perceive.
Instead, we call ourselves “higher” beings, capable of making complex decisions, understanding complicated mathematical formulae (such as the path of a pointy hunk of dead tree bark being thrown to impale a semi-defenseless beast of prey that is awfully tasty and nutritious when prepared properly). We create a mish-mash of sounds and scratches on parchment, associate one with another, and call it language, which we share with others in our georgraphic region. We formulate methods for the efficient cultivation of foodstuffs, to feed our masses, and in doing so, we create economies that allow the succesful to reap rewards greater than those that merely consume. We attempt to understand all that occurs around us, create mounds of numbers and representations of numbers and operations on representations of numbers to proove that we understand it all. Then, we manipulate, organize, shuffle, and recalculate the numbers to bend our world, the very container for our beings, to our own wills. We devise complex theories, both out of numbers and of the scratches on parchment, regarding our own nature, and what makes us… us. We meld the underlying understanding of these forms of communication to provide framework for discovering, discussing, and dispatching our own little, pointless attempts at defining what it is that turns a ball of organized chemicals into something that does not identify itself as “We” or “Us”, but as “I”.
And yet, through all of this “higher” activity, very, very few of us will ever, for even just a moment now and then, just live. To just… breathe.
And of course, to let the rest of the world go on without us for a couple of days while we recharge our minds, emotions, our physical beings.
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