Been gone for a while, that’s because I went searching for the cheerful, bubbly self who seemed to have lost her way. That go-getter, optimistic, fighter self went missing, and was replaced by a melancholic self. Seems rather childish to be quoting a children’s film, but it felt almost as if the Sadness in Inside Out had been occupying the whole of me, and all I saw was blue and grey. Occasionally there were glimpses of rays but they didn’t last, and then it was back to blue, grey and black.
Today, though, something happened. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but it felt as if the lid that kept me locked inside the sadness has suddenly been lifted, and as I climbed out of the hole I dug for myself I felt lighter, shedding layers of worries and melancholy with every step I take. I was in the subway on my way to work, and every motion of everyone around me seemed to turned into a slow-mo movie. Every sensation heightened, every sound echoed and dropped its frequency, everything seemed funny and amusing. It felt as if I were tripping, except I wasn’t. Granted, it only lasted for a minute or two and it all went back to normal when I had to get out of the station, but it was awesome while it lasted. A kind of high that’s hard to describe, and definitely not on any influence of drugs.
I realized, in that split second when I returned to my senses, that this, is all there is. This is all we’ve got. The present moment. It’s more than words can explain. It’s something we think we know as we read the words, but only superficially. We think we know, but most of the time we really don’t. No really. We don’t. We’d write about it, we think we know to live every moment, but we so often lose sight, and be blinded by things, events, people. More often that not, we don’t really feel it, we’re not aware of it. We go by our daily lives doing things because we’re accustomed to doing them. It’s habit, it’s routine, it’s something we “have to do”. It’s autopilot. We tell ourselves stories, the stories stick to us, and we live out the stories. At some point we aren’t even sure if we write the stories or the stories own us. If the stories we told ourselves were lies, then lies were all we lived. And before we know it, we’d be at the very end of it, and only when we have to face death, do we reflect upon the gazillions of moments that we lived through, that made up the days, the months, the years. It is then that we’d realize that we let too many of those moments slipped by us without really making the best out of it.
I don’t know what’s gotten to me this morning in that subway, at that moment, when all this burst of thought came to mind. Maybe I’m going crazy; maybe it’s a mini-epiphany that is a wake-up call to stop brooding. Maybe it’s the Divine Being brushing past me, if you happen to believe in those. And if you’re in Richard Dawkins’ team, then maybe it’s just synapses (over)firing and this happened to be one of the many billion thoughts that randomly occurred, thus making it just that- one of the billions of possibilities and nothing more.
All I know is this- I have nothing, except the present moment. No more, no less. I am exactly what I think of myself- whether I think of myself as a useful person or a worthless nut, I am right. And the last and most important thing of all, is this- I need to stop thinking so much. Stop thinking, stop worrying, stop being angry at myself, stop inflicting pain on myself. Just. stop.
It’s time I let go. And let go, I will.
