Dear Diary,
Like everyone, I spend my days immersed in full attention in movement. In the movement within my own inner self, my own thoughts and imagination. Part of the time it’s a feverish, tension-filled attempt to understand where in the program code one of the most important variables is losing its value. I call that work. Part – scanning the Facebook window with my eyes and inwardly rejoicing or getting upset about the events, people, and commenters visible there. I call that leisure. Part – watching a dull series and guessing how events will unfold in the next minute. I call that rest. Yet how absurd all this would look if viewed from somewhere very high up, from a distant, distant planet. A person simply sits, performing the most minimal movements, yet within them in this way their entire life flies by. The process of weaving thoughts and visualizations, based on the same principles and often consuming the same amount of energy, by its content alone, its subject matter, determines what the person who is seemingly doing nothing is actually doing – working or resting. Rejoicing or suffering. Planning or remembering. And it doesn’t even matter where they’re sitting at the time – on the edge of a bed, at a desk, on a bus, in a plane, or in a favorite armchair with a favorite book in hand – in practice, physically they perform one and the same action – sitting.
I think the roots of this lie in the fact that the actual movement of a hand, leg, or gaze is completely uninteresting to us. So uninteresting that we involuntarily try to avoid it. There’s simply no comparison – how much interest can there be in a simple raising of the hand? Zero. An absolute zero. And how much of it rushes before our inner gaze in a colorful, all-encompassing nightmare? Countless! So whether we want to or not, our attention always turns not to the hand’s movement, but to the thoughts that movement triggers in us.
Yet sometimes happiness visits us. The happiness of feeling the beauty of our movement, however small. The happiness of feeling the warmest emotion toward that movement. And with that happiness sneaks in one of the most beautiful miracles – a warm feeling toward our own movement instantly glues a person back into an indivisible whole. A person ceases to be a blackened old sheet of plywood delaminated into seven layers. That entire path my attention traveled from me to the work I’m performing, piercing through the inner world, the barriers separating inside from outside, and the outside itself suddenly collapses into something singular. Between me and what I’m doing, no distance remains, no separation remains. The separation of inner space with its manically dancing thoughts and visualizations in its wake. And along with it collapse all the “Why? I don’t want to! I can’t! I’m no longer capable!”.
Don’t want? Can’t? No longer capable? That’s only because you’ve grown fond of the wrong movement, the one you ought to have grown fond of.
Have a beautiful Friday! :-)
