Sunday night. Coming down from the recent stresses of juggling a new health crisis while entertaining a visitor and trying to keep either from impacting work or school. Sometimes, I do not realize that mine is an often frenetic life. It doesn’t feel that way; it actually feels kind of boring. I know, weird, I suppose.
Inside my head, it just seems rather mundane and uneventful. Even when things are exploding or imploding all around me. I keep thinking that eventually, I will find the enthusiasm and excitement that it seems everyone around me has, but most days are really quite “empty” in the buddhist way; nothing really touches me but on occasion and all of it flies by so fast that the overall feeling is mostly just flatline.
I wonder about it, sometimes. Maybe my threshold got set too high as a result of “the history”; birth to about, oh, 33 or so was something of a war zone. Maybe all that unrest and horror put the line for experiencing simple things out of reach. I mean, I feel things all over the place, but the only things that really seem to reach the place that wants to feel more are the sad, pensive, wistful, or angry ones. The rest – the happinesses, the contentments, the pinnacles all just seem kind of…. flat.
I get more happiness from seeing other people happy than being happy myself. I just don’t see as much of it as I used to, I suppose. Perspective? Maybe. I recognize happiness pretty easily in others, but it doesn’t seem to shine as often around me as it once did.
Take right now, for example. It is a quiet, Sunday night. I’m all caught up on school, work is finally starting to look and feel enjoyable again, I am – quite literally – becoming healthier, I have all the necessities well covered and am spending my time doing things for other people “just because I can”; all in all, life is as good (if not better) than it’s ever been. But I am sitting here feeling utterly flatlined. Not unhappy, not wistful or in any way “bothered”, but not anything on the other side of the “extreme” at all. Equilibrium, I suppose; completely neutral.
It doesn’t even bother me, except in the intellectual way where I sit around like I am at the moment, thinking about it. But, as you can see, this is hardly bothersome; it’s somewhat like walking around something and just observing it. Aloof, detached, and unaffected.
It’s just that I have this mental mantra that keeps telling me “life isn’t supposed to be this calm” inside the head. I feel abnormal? No, not really (for all I often joke to this end). In fact, the only reason I’m “going on” about it at all is because it gives my mind something to do. I’m not in the space where creative writing would be fruitful, so it’s casual, calm introspection instead.
No real point, just walking around it and letting whatever flits through the mind flow down my arms and out my fingers. Stream of consciousness. Whatever and whatever and no matter.
Should I write a haiku now? Some illusory bit of meaningfulness? Contrived, I suppose. Maybe another movie. Maybe a book. Maybe bed. It doesn’t matter, really… and that’s not in a “bad” way. I think that is, perhaps, the real point of doing this at all — noting for myself that this is a common state of being for me and that it is neither “bad” or “good”.
It just is.