"It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world "
-Mary Oliver
I’m beginning to realize, (though it might be an obvious thing) that it is physically impossible to split myself in two. Yeah, it’s a no-brainer right; I mean duh, you can only focus on one thing at a time, only spend so much of your energy in a single place in a single moment. Even knowing this, I somehow still end up thinking that it’s feasible to try and get a million things done in a single day with minimal time to myself so as to avoid the deep pit of nothingness that lives in every one of us which reveals, (if you let it) a core truth of life—you gonna die alone, babe.
Cheerful stuff.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m finding increasingly that I feel an insurmountable sense of guilt in my downtime. I’m in the prime of my life, and everything around me is telling me I’m behind and imperfect and that if I spend 5 minutes to sit on a bench, I’ll miss out on everything. And I’d just like to know—when did a few moments to yourself become the sickening, gut-wrenching terror of our generation?
I’m sure we’ve all been told at one point or another that our access to technology shapes the way we perceive ourselves and our time on this earth, but who the hell listened to those guys the first time around? Well, turns out they might have a point. Apps like Instagram cut down your attention span to that of a bloated goldfish futzing around in some water, waiting for something to happen just to have the pleasure of forgetting it 3 seconds later. Our ability to sit and do literally nothing is almost gone. In fact, “doing nothing” is pretty much synonymous with scrolling—there’s no point of actual rest in our day until out heads hit the pillow at night (after which most of us will probably pick up our phones anyway and scroll through another 100 photos of Kylie Jenner’s kid because hey, maybe it’s different from the last 50 times you saw it).
We’re a society built on the power of guilt from doing too much or too little, from not dieting, from being ‘fake’ and ‘natural’. Our consciousness flits from one polarizing idea to the next, “progressing” along this band of time until we forget who we were to begin with. And maybe that’s what’s expected of us, in the end—to forget from where we’ve come, to dissolve seamlessly into ugly binary code.
But before that happens, we can take the longer route to work or school that veers off the road and into a forest or something, and in the forest we can find a bench and just sort of sit for a while without feeling like the world is coming to an end.