Letter 13: On Doing
The sound of a voice drifts in and out, and though the language is familiar, you can’t seem to extract meaning from what is being said. You follow the speaker’s cadence until a flash of lucidity reveals a phrase. Your mind fixates on it, but it soon begins to swim among the other fragments in your mind, forming nonsensical images until you cannot distinguish what is real and what is imagined. You slip further from consciousness and into a scene at your bathroom sink, toothbrush in hand, preparing yourself for the day, only to be jarred awake to the fuzziness of unwashed teeth.
You continue to lurch in and out of sleep, like an abandoned boat beating against the shore, until finally a passerby takes pity and hauls you from the water.
The voice continues on droning in the background. You flail one of your arms around and manage to smack the OFF button of your clock radio.
You lie there, half victor, half vanquished, exhausted already. The interior of your face feels thick and cottony, your eyes mere pinholes, like a demented stuffed toy. You know you should move, but the prospect of waking weighs heavily on you, conjuring up buried fears. You feel homesick while still very much tucked up in your bed.
You think of all the generations that preceded you, ancestors who fought off invasions and starvation and horrific medieval diseases, and here you are, the culmination of these millennia of survival, barely able to haul your corpse into an upright position.
This oppressiveness may feel physical in nature, but it is more often than not that sadistic commander taking up residence in your skull, that computer made of flesh that we mere apes are far too unsophisticated to wield.
The only way to do battle with your mind is to disengage from it and revert to the part of yourself that is more primal. Become a body again and engage the machinery you’re made of. I do, therefore I am.
Take a scrub brush to a scummed up bathtub and you see before you the direct correlation between the scraping of the bristles and the slow reveal of white enamel. Forgo the brush, scratch against the stubborn bits with your fingernail, and watch the scum curl up into shavings.
Sweeping a floor. Preparing a meal for your children. Tending to a garden. There is wisdom in the mundane and comfort in the confinement of repetition, in the way an animal is not burdened by the possibilities that exist beyond its instinct. For all the complexity of our minds, the body simply cries out to be useful. For all the complexity of the universe, there is reassurance in knowing that it is only a matter of the passage of time before the floor will need to be swept again.
Thanks for reading. See you in two weeks.