It often strikes me as curious how often we fail to realize how easy it can be to forget certain fundamental things in life. And, more importantly, what fundamental things we really don't want to remember. Not curiously, only yesterday was I greeted with the prospect of facing my own 'fundamental thing' which I truly did not want to face: stagnation.
For some people stagnation can be better known as the feeling you get when you find yourself in an airport and your plane has been, as always, delayed. For me, however, it isn't merely the act of being delayed which forces me to remember what I want to forget but, perhaps more realistically, it is the act of waiting itself. Even more realistically, it isn't just the waiting which hurts but the distance which the waiting so clearly highlights.
Distance. A word so neatly written that it doesn't seem to mean anything at all. What is distance? A mental distance? A physical distance between you and me? I didn't, and don't, know. Maybe distance itself didn't mean so much as what it represents.
So there I was, in my school library, ping-ponging with myself the notion that I might do something which, oddly, had never ocurred for me to do before. I was going to walk home from school. In the minds of some this would be such a pedestrian thought that it might not be worth thinking about at all. For me, it was like being handed an invitation and deciding whether I wanted to go. My instincts, as they always do, over-ruled my perhaps more mental processes and I soon found myself walking out of the town where my school can be found.
Before long, I had found myself practically marching along the side of a road which I had never even graced my feet upon -- never mind walked along. As fun as so many fitness experts say walking is, it wasn't long before my mind had completely ignored that fact that I was actually moving and moved onto another, more pressing matter.
I'd like to think that it was the combination of highly intermittent traffic and fairly mundane weather that forced my mind into a pot of charged thinking. Honestly, though, I really couldn't say. What I do know is that while my legs were doing one type of work, my mind was doing another. Like so many people, as Alanis Morisette so helpfully highlighted, I find the idea of silence a little bit scary. Beyond the fact that my ears are graced with low-level chronic tinitus, not being able to distract my mind from the internal storm that had been brewing for the past several weeks proved to be an unfortunate mix. And so, like the man Morisette was talking about, I too was petrified of the silence.
After only a short while I found myself ambling along country lanes which I'm sure were designed to erode the sanity of those not using a machine that travels over 10 miles per hour. Though I've never been one for trying to force myself to achieve something that my body wasn't designed for, I nonetheless made some sort of pact with myself that I was going to get home before anyone else did. Within moments, walking became more of a push-through-the-wall affair than an amble along a country lane. With time progressing, the weather, as so typical of British life, began to do the same. When I reached what could only be labelled as the nicest part of my journey, the heavy boom of thunder pounded in the not-so-far distance.
Along with that thunder came another thunder of my own. With my own internal storm brewing, I'm sure you can understand my reaction when I found myself at the end of another round of back-stab Twitter 'bullying'. Having cheesed-off a couple of Twitter folk over their extremely poor choice of words (which is putting it lightly), it seemed another had joined the gang. Though I'm not much of a fighter in the 'real' world, I like to think that I'm good at attacking with words, rather than fists. Suffice it to say, I had had enough. That was the end of their role in my life. And while I had done with them, it seemed something internally was not done with me.
Being someone drawn to melancholy, combined with these goings-on in my Twitter-life, it truly felt like the mini-storm of my own was finally showing its true colours. And, in such a scary way, there seemed to be few people whose houses I could hide in until the storm had passed. In a circular way, the storm itself was certainly washing away a lot of things I had tried to bury. With my thunder and lightning crashing and booming in more than a small corner of my mind, my attention swiftly shifted to related matters. If my ship was sinking, there would be no white flag above my door, either.
With the typhoon in full swing, I decided there was nothing to lose. Sending a short 'do you hate me?' message for me has never been an easy task because of the inevitable fear that someone, sometime, will say yes. What I ended up receiving, though, opened up a proverbial house for me to take refuge in: and as soon as I entered, it was as if there had never been a storm at all.
With this person showing me that there was no hostility towards me within her -- and that she was even sorry if she had done anything to offend me -- now out into the open, it started to get me thinking. Why is it that we are told, by both our instincts and the people around us, that storms are such dangerous things to experience? More and more it seemed that if you just reach out and take the hand that's waiting to be grabbed, then the help -- whether mental, emotional or spiritual -- will be there.
And so I couldn't help but wonder, are we truly afraid of the storm because of what we're told by others, or because of what we tell ourselves?
(Writing style adapted by the one highlighted in 'Sex and the City' used by 'Carrie Bradshaw'). I really enjoyed writing this article, so © Matt. Dixon, 2009. All Rights Reserved.
