Word of the Week - 142

Art by Fabienne Cinquin.

Word(s) of the Week:  WHEN IN DOUBT

In times of confusion, I turn or have turned variously to food, sleep, humor, dithering, weeping, growing quiet, snapping, any distraction like organizing my color pencils yet again, pondering and, as a last resort, making a very simple plan.

The holidays confuse me.  Relentless promoting of costly, material goods makes me sad.  It seems so anti-holiday.  I used to be able to participate so differently, certainly with greater energy and other resources.  That was a very long time ago.  What passes for The News confuses me for I mistrust most of it, either to be actually newsworthy or to be true.

While I would not call myself a tough cookie of the old school, neither am I easily confused so it takes a really large and seething mass of chaos to throw me any distance.  Also known as, when the holidays and news collide.

Which brings me to, "Ow-my head," and other home-grown things a bright girl can do.  A useful response to confusion is not unlike a healthy reaction to physical peril from, oh, a poisonous snake or other predatory, lethal life form.  For me, that means stand still for as long as necessary.  Do nothing big or noisy or fast.  Drawing, with or without coloring, fits that description.  When figures or forms seem too much, I draw words, often silly ones that somehow help me feel less disoriented.  As each of us is unique, what is medicine for one may be further confusion for another.  It is not one size fits all.

I freely admit to being a conspiracy theorist.  One of the suspected conspiracies involves someone/someones somewhere being highly invested in keeping us confused or distracted in ways that render us non-functioning.  This is not new business, this didn't just happen.  Our job is to be as present, as bright and alert as possible, as don't-get-fooled-again skeptical as we can be.  Getting caught up with all the other fish who swim around in circles renders us useless.

It doesn't matter how one combats this fugue state, just that we resist it.  There IS a way out.  It is our job to find it, to draw its picture so we'll know it when/if it shows up again, regardless of the disguise it chooses.  Each of us is responsible for being present, for being our truest and most solid self by our own definition.  There is much to be said for simply holding a place of certainty when doubt seems to have the upper hand.  It is not about being right, it is about being.

Black holes and hammer throws

"A black hole is a region of space whose gravity is so strong that it acts like a giant vacuum cleaner in space. Anything that gets too close gets sucked in. When it hits the center, the singularity, it disappears forever. The gravity in black holes is SO strong that it tugs at space and time, slowing down time and stretching out space. Not even light, the fastest thing in the universe, can escape from a black hole."

Yesterday, it was all "walk and don't look back," sung, said and meant.  Today, though nothing that can be seen or even known has changed, my center has become the astronomic phenomenon which even light cannot outrun.  It could make a person feel leaden and stuck and more than a little deranged.


I would not describe myself as mercurial by nature, though others may disagree.  As age and other things overtake me, I believe I am reasonably consistent, maybe even predictable.  Yet following a day of inner peace and happiness, mixed with the confusion that now seems a fixture in our lives, as Donald Trump again, hey, presto!, flourishes President Obama's birth certificate (or so he says) for our scorn and rejection, today I have been called out by vagabond anxiety, thinking this looked like a good place to crash.  


The morning began with email, including an Amazon promotion, books about Paris.  One of them, I believe it was called Everything Looks Like Dessert, prompted me to take the "closer look" and as far as I could determine, the only things that looked like desserts were pastries.  Awake at 3 a.m., I played with letter forms in my journal, a phrase I read yesterday: Do More Of What You Love.  Well, duh.  And I had planned to do exactly that today.  Anxiety had another agenda.


Just now, a phone conversation with a friend, brought up - relative to Earthly swampiness and the aforementioned excessive gravity - the memory of a Kingston Trio song about the Everglades, "...if the skeeters don't get you then the gators will."  I feel the need for calamine lotion and high, dry ground.


Any tolerance I once may have had for whining has been ground to dust.  That includes my own.  Anything I speak that sounds like a complaint causes me to feel that I've punched all my gifts and good fortune in the nose.  And so help me, I see this as a mystery in which we may all be conscripted actors, but if it smacks of complaining, I apologize, as I do if I just repeat myself using different (or not different) words from post to post.


How it feels is like being the ball portion of a hammer throw rig (I think they call them rigs), being swung around and around and then let fly, to land - wherever.  Being made of human stuff, the harder landings are hellish.  I have bruises to prove it.  What I am is misplaced, bewildered and in touch with quite a few people who are going through the same thing, the sense of having lost our way, become unhitched from our moorings.

The ride is not as fun as it looks.



(Hammer throw photo credit: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~zacharyr/zackHobbies.htm and blogger will not let me adjust the spacing between paragraphs, which will tell you something about the state of things.)