With the help of select teachers in various physical arts, I bridged my inabilities with their expertise to make a crossing. I am still confounded by the empathy I felt from others throughout the year. Such empathy enabled me to feel what I was feeling.
This is one of the paradoxes of the human psyche, that rather than feel in times of distress, the body diverts and numbs overwhelming sensations. I can tell you more about this self-sabotaging, and the realization that it was not an enemy.
This year, I wanted to feel again, and feel deeper.
I did feel deeper and farther than I envisioned. Looking back, I seemed to undergo a cycle of approaching the limits of my body. Underneath this forward momentum was a primal urge, like the infinite energy reserves characteristic of a bull tilling the paddy. When I came to, I was already stretched beyond my comfort zone. An unease spreads through me writing this. I recognize this indefinite surge of brute force as something familiar. What does the mind do in these moments of uneasy recognition? Where do I take it? Is it a problem to be solved? I simply let the experience ride out, and notice my observations.
I would like to redirect my attention to the ways I approach challenges. These were the moments when I hit a limit and felt like I could go no further. It would seem like I made choices that tapered effort. Contrary to what happened, I am inclined to inquire if I ever held back. Wasn’t I already so stretched in one direction that it would seem that nothing was withheld? I doubt the ability to tune back into these junctures clearly. There is something mesmerizing about the directionality of thought, that when aimed at one instance in time and space, the destination becomes empty. I arrive to explore what happened in times of stress and find nothing.
And, only in moments months away from these key ones during the year, I feel so much more. I have zoomed out. And I see that another barrier comes into view. I get to know it. I sit outside it, I experience time passing with it. I experience my body there, with it. And then it passes. The moment. And the focus is on another realm of consciousness. As if consciousness is partitioned with borders and barriers, making it a participant in nationalism. But the actual, initially undertaken approach, the one I began two paragraphs ago at “bull tilling the paddy,” is unclear. My thought of an anticipated marvelous thing to say at the end here appears no longer as I go towards it. Shininess arrives when it is there. It is much more difficult to find it in the anticipatory process. I do not know where I will arrive.