Monday, 14 December, 2020
My mind is a bramble of musing questions. Mostly just thoughts of curiosities more than anything concrete. This is often the case, but prior to starting my new role at work, I had more time for this sort of exploration. I didn't appreciate that enough when I had it, but now that I don't have as much freedom in terms of hours in a day and week you’d better believe I miss having more empty squares on the calendar.
What this has led to, for almost this entire year, is a lack of processing. Time was that I would mull these thoughts over whilst on an eight-mile run before work. As the mood struck—and as I had what I considered to be something insightful to say—I might write those thoughts down in some form or fashion. I can't have those sorts of runs most days anymore. And if I do manage to crawl out of bed early enough to have a run resembling what I used to, I sure as hell don't have time to write any of these thoughts down in any way that preserves them well.
It has taken almost a year to find some new form of rhythm. It was hard to let go of the way I used to approach the day. I live and die by the strength of my routines and, when they're disrupted in a significant way, my mental health takes a massive hit, especially if that disruption persists long term. This vocational transition has been one of the most difficult seasons of my life to date, which is unexpected and astounding to me.
And yet, I am starting to see progress. Instead of eight miles to start the day, I've learned that I can achieve a similar result with a shorter run on either end of the workday. Once I managed to hit a thirty-mile week for the first time in forever, I noticed a significant boost in my mental state. My emotions became far more manageable and it was much easier to stave off overwhelm and fatigue. I've maintained a thirty-mile per week minimum each week since and I even managed to hit a forty-mile week recently, which was just huge for me these days. But today, after just a three-mile jaunt, I experienced the first fully cerebral run I've had for a long time.
For context, it normally takes me about five miles to hit a runner's high, if I'm going to find one. There are some runs where the high never really happens and some wonderful, beautiful flukes where I'm able to hit that high significantly earlier. Today was one such run. This has been a preamble.
***
On this run, my thoughts wandered in the best way. I forgot everything that existed outside of my present internal reality and, instead, followed a stream-of-conscious runaway train of thought that took me on a merry chase through the corridors of my mind. I had an idea for how I might reframe a story to solve a few issues I've been trying to iron out for literal years, and that was a starting point this evening.
I followed those narrative fixes for a while, but soon found myself wandering down a different rabbit trail altogether. Before long, I was thinking less about story problems and more about personal struggles I have yet to resolve. What solutions might I find? What options are open for exploration? What does the future look like for me?
Thinking about this ephemeral, ethereal future got me thinking about the past, about my memories and lived experiences, about where I came from. I recalled, in particular, challenges I had as a child: questions of eternity.
Looking back now, I wonder if I—as a child—understood eternity in a way most adults don't ever seem to. I always found the idea of Heaven to be obscenely distasteful. Any form of non-terminal conscious existence, really, is an unbearable concept. As a child, I understood that eternity was absolutely unfathomable in scope. There was no possible benchmark against which to measure degrees of anything meaningful when on the other end of the spectrum is no end at all, just infinity.
Even time is a meaningless concept when set against the proposition of eternity. Ten thousand years is a meaningful metric to us mortals because we have some baseline understanding of what a human lifetime is and we know, through intuitive mathematics, roughly what the scale of ten thousand years means for a singular human experiencing it with unbroken conscious awareness. The immensity is daunting, but it's not a crazy leap of imagination to extrapolate the little eighty or ninety year blip we experience into something more or less the same, only far longer.
So if I say, "For ten thousand years you will do this one thing and this one thing only," that is a grandiose proclamation, in part, because it is fathomable. I understand how much longer than my life that is and I can imagine how much like drudgery everything must seem after even just a thousand years of no dynamic change.
There is no comparable metric to use when we're talking about the concept of eternal life as promised by various religious scriptures in some form or other. To say, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years/bright shining as the sun/we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise/than when we’d first begun,” has absolutely no meaning. There can't be "days" in eternity. There can't be years. There can't be any meaningful concept of time. In an everlasting existence, everything just is; there is no duration.
The very thought of life as a conscious being trapped in any sort of eternity is an absurdist nightmare to me.
As a child, though, I was presented with a binary—as many of us are. Do I want to spend eternity in Heaven or Hell, endless pleasure or endless pain? Presented with such a choice, I opted for the lesser of two evils. "Give me the eternal bliss, please," I thought as I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ to be my personal savior. But when most folks' dream of paradise, they are dreaming of my Hell. Or so it seems.
***
I don't have much of a sense of smell or taste. I can smell well enough to grasp what someone means when they say, "That smells nice." Similarly, I taste well enough to know what people are talking about when they claim that, "This is my favorite flavor." So throughout my life, I'd not really thought much about either of those senses, nor my experience of them in relation to that of others. It's not that I didn't want to explore those aspects of the human experience. I just didn't realize they merited exploration.
You see I've always found scent elusive and fleeting. I'd step in the house after a run while mom was baking cookies from time to time while I was in high school, and for the first few seconds after reentering the house, I'd smell the cookies in the oven and it would be glorious. After a few moments, though, the smell would fade and I would discern no scent at all.
And when it comes to taste, I've always been a picky eater. Food is a begrudging necessity to me. I don't enjoy it. Eating is an entirely utilitarian exercise for me more often than not. As an example, there is no degree to which pizza is good or bad. If a pizza is eatable, it is good. If it is not, it is bad. It's a binary, not a spectrum. Gourmet pizza is wasted on me because I don't get any more joy out of that than I do out of Little Caesar's Hot-N-Ready.
Because I never encountered any reason to question it, I assumed mine was the normative experience. The subject never came up, either, so I was never challenged on this faulty assumption. That is, until I was at work a few years ago and one of my coworkers showed up for an afternoon shift suffering from a mild cold. In passing, she mentioned that her least favorite part of having a cold was the fact that she couldn't taste any of her food hardly at all. This took me aback. I asked her about it.
"Why can't you taste anything when you have a cold?" I said. "Why should a cold have anything to do with that?"
"You know when you were a kid,” she replied, “and you would plug your nose when you had to eat something you didn't like? So you couldn't taste it?"
I was floored.
"That works?"
I had heard that plugging your nose can make insufferable flavors more palatable, but I thought it was an old wives' tale. I remember trying it as a kid, disappointed that it didn't alter the flavor I experienced in the slightest. I assumed it didn't work for anybody else, either.
But suddenly, my entire paradigm shifted. Suddenly, my experience was the aberration, not the normative baseline. I experience food in a fundamentally different way than most folks I know; I experience food in a way that brings almost no joy more often than not. I can't say it gives me no joy at all because I have certainly had foods that I quite like, I just don't like them to the degree that others do and the aspects of them I like tend to have more to do with texture than flavor.
Once I learned that food is such a delightful thing for so many, I wondered what it must be like to truly appreciate food.
***
For most of my life, until a very few months ago, I assumed that most people experience emotions and thoughts in more or less in the same ways I do. I thought everyone was as depressed, lonely, and dismal as I was. I simply believed myself to be exceptionally bad at coping. I thought of my dance with depression as the normative experience.
Through some rather enlightening and terrifying conversations with others, I've come to understand that, I'm not just bad at managing the pressures of life. The way I experience daily existence is fundamentally different from most of my friends and family, at least those with whom I've spoken on the subject.
One such conversation took place a couple of months ago with my significant other. I don't remember what prompted the conversation at the moment—nor do I recall exactly what the context was at the time—but what I do recall is the moment where I realized that she hoped she would live a very long life whereas I expected to die young, finding the idea of a long life as odious as the idea of eternity.
It depends on the day but more often than I tend to admit, I don't know that I want to live past my thirties. Sometimes I'm not quite so morose but, frequently, the notion of my mortality is a comfort. Ironically, it's the certainty I will one day die keeping any serious thoughts of suicide from me. This mortal coil is a burden to bear until it is lifted by the siren call bidding Sisyphus set aside his futility and rest, finally at peace.
It's not that I find every day to be a slog through the trenches of drudgery and despair. Like with food, I experience enough elation and happiness that I find life tolerable and worth riding out for the time being, but I can also see that others seem to have a fundamentally different take on what is to be alive. Mine is not the normative experience here either.
I find the endless maintenance of life in the modern world to hold little capacity to retain my attention for a great many years. Much of that depends on how current political realities shakeout over the next five to ten years or so, but even with a best case scenario, something would have to fundamentally change in my perceived experience to get me excited about the future.
Maybe that change can be brought about through medication. It seems a likelier solution to me than anything I’ve yet tried, and it's an option I want to explore. But the fact remains that in an unaltered state my mind works differently than what seems to be the norm, for better and worse.
***
What does any of this mean or matter? I don't really know. Perhaps none of it means very much at all. Perhaps I've wasted the better part of my evening writing out inane thoughts and ramblings. But for me, all of this serves as a larger lesson. Mine is not the normative experience. Neither is yours. The universe is spectral and multifaceted. I'm atypical in a few ways—ways in which, perhaps, you're closer to the norm than I am, such as it is.
Even so, you've got a distinct quirk inside your psyche, too. There's some part of you that's the exception, not the rule. Even if you don't know what it is, it's there. And you'll continue to be blind to it until the question presents itself in a way you are incapable of ignoring.
This is one reason I find Nolan's film Inception to be so powerful. The concept of the film rests upon the premise that no one changes their mind unless they think it’s their idea. A change of heart must feel like it comes from within. No one set out to change my perspective on food. No one decided to turn my emotional reality upside down. I had to realize those things on my own in a context devoid of aggression or confrontation where I could think about the implications without having to defend my own validity.
And even now, I'm projecting that experience as the normative one. I'm assuming that you, like me, must discover these things on your own in order for them to stick. That's me assuming you're experience must necessarily parallel mine. I don't know if what I'm saying of me is true of you. And even if it is the general rule, there is inevitably going to be an exception.
For my part, I'm trying to take a step back and view my own experience for what it is: my own experience. It's the only one I've got and, as far as I'm concerned, it's the only one I want. But I don't want all of us to have the same experience in the same way that I’d rather not consciously exist for always and eternity. If life holds any meaning at all, it's in the harmonious discord of our isolated experiences shared side-by-side.
But that is, of course, only from my vantage.