boolar

Push the sideways triangle to hear Juss Like Heaven

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I don’t have words to explain what’s been going on.  Or maybe I do, I’m just too lazy to find them.  Okay, I’ll try.

I feel like I can fly.  But then I try, and find I’m even more bound to the ground than I used to assume.  I feel like I’m happier and healthier than I’ve been in a long time.  Then I think about writing a letter to my Eudaemonist and start to cry because thinking of her makes me think of everything I’ve been through since I’ve seen her last and the tears are not from pain as much as relief that it’s all over.  It sounds silly when you write it, but it is all seriousness when it happens.

What I mean to say is that I’m more keenly aware of the limitations of my body than ever.  But such an awareness (and acceptance) allows me to better use myself closer to my full potential (even if that is lesser than I formerly believed).

Life is an exercise in dichotomy these days.¹ I think I mean contradiction.  But not quite contradiction.  Bifurcation?² No.  Now I’m just being silly. ³

What do I mean?  In a recent ramble, I spoke of balance, and yearned for it.  I think I’m closer to it than I’ve ever been⁴, but the dot-danged strangest thing is that balance isn’t what I imagined. It doesn’t mean walking down the straight, flat, partly-cloudy paved road of life⁵. No, no, it means that there are times when you need a machete to hack your way through the rainy jungle of days and there are times when you roll down the grassy, daisy-covered summerdays but that when you add them all together and divide by the total number of days they equal balance.

That’s why I’ve been crying and laughing at the same time so many times a week these past few. I’m going to die. But I get to live right now. So I’m never without a reason to be exuberantly happy or dangerously sad. But of late, they have been so firmly intertwined that I can’t bring one to mind without the other forcing itself upon my heart. And though you might have another name for it⁶, that’s what I call balance.

P.S. Remember that kale plant I told you about.  Here we are, about to eat her.

1. I can’t believe I used that word.  I’m not even sure if I’m using it strictly correctly.  I learned to distrust (read: hate) that word (and another: paradigm) my first year of college, when I heard it used almost daily, out of all proper proportion and context, presumably because it sounded good to the speaker. It is interesting to me that when I transferred from the private college to the public university, I stopped encountering either word in gratuitous use. [↩]
2. Back to college: the Russian professor whose name I don’t remember and whose face is blurred used that word many times a day in Chaos & Fractals, still the coolest math class ever.  I never tired of hearing him pronounce that word, with stress on the penultimate syllable [↩]
3. Speaking of silly, can you believe that searches for “squirrel pun” have led twelve people to this site?  Thank you, SlimStat, and whoever wrote your code for that information. Now I know that I am not alone.  There are at least a dozen other people banging their heads against walls in search of one lousy squirrel pun. [↩]
4. Thank you, Lisa and the rest of Working Class Acupuncture and the Community Acupuncture Network. I don’t credit you entirely, but you certainly have facilitated the recent changes in my life [↩]
5. Which is what pharmaceutical anti-depressants try to create for those under their sway. They cut out the extreme lows, which comes at a cost. You guessed it, the extreme highs have also got to go. Sounds a bit like selling your soul to the devil to me. [↩]
6. Crazy and manic-depressive are two that come immediately to mind [↩]