Of Our Own Device

Sometimes you just need to take a breath and hit reset.  Sometimes you need a break from normalcy.  I find that this happens to me quite often.  I need a rest from the “fine, and you?”  I need to express how I really am, whether it be floating on the transcendence of an excellent story, or descending slowly into a maddening creative silence. 

Recently I’ve been writing letters to various friends and family.  Letters are the easiest and truest form of communication I’ve found, because they are safe.  Time and distance separate me from the person I am talking to, so I can safely reach down into the core of myself and say what I am really thinking and feeling.  I don’t have to worry about the crease of brow, the twist of mouth that together say how outside of acceptable public expression my words are.  I don’t have to hear those people wondering what I am talking about, when what they mean is why am I talking about something that is not easy, expected, safe, normal.

I wonder sometimes if other people feel this way.  They must.  The human mind is so intricate, so fascinating, so expansive, and yet this small concept of “normal” restrains our lives, our actions, our thoughts, to a tiny area.  We are so afraid of straying outside of those lines that we make prisoners of ourselves.  I think that this is unspeakably tragic.

I hope that I can be brave enough to knock down those mental walls and think precisely the way I want to.  I hope that I can take those words I’ve feared in the past—words like weird and strange and crazy—and wear them with pride.  How can it be a bad thing to think of things that most others never have?  What I am doing is expanding the reach of human consciousness.  Should that not be something that we want? 

I refuse to believe that the human race wants nothing more than to be small, to inhabit the same mental space it always has.  I prefer to have greater faith in us than that.