i can't remember who said this, but she wrote I jump out of bed and land on a bomb. i spend the rest of the day putting myself back together." this has been my experience over and over again. i climb out of bed in the morning feeling great. five minutes later i'm cascaded with gloom. whatever i have to do becomes overwhelming, not just the next 12 hours, no, my whole life!
it's taken me a long time to make some sense of this. what does my mind do to me? leaving dreams it builds my daytime world all over again. this takes effort. evidently scientific research proves our thoughts wander 30% of the time. concentration of the yoga sort takes years to develop. when i wake my mind expands to include the whole universe. i'm knocked over.
it's the surprise, i'm sure, that does it. reading about stage fright in theater, the conclusion: inadequate or the wrong kind of preparation. the actor Oliver Olivier spent six years fighting his fears onstage. he didn't quit, for fear he'd never return. i don't know his solution, but i know. he was famous for working from the outside in. he'd put on a fake nose and suddenly he'd be Cyrano. he'd walk with a limp. voila, richard the third would inhabit his body.
well, i figure he'd lost his concentration and this method wouldn't work. in other words, inadequate preparation. most modern actors work inside out. they do a lot of personal soul searching, finding emotional moments in their own lives to fill out the character. they prepare by stumbling around in their minds and past experiences. eventually they roll out a living snowman.
so, when i leap out of bed and explode, it simply means i have not prepared myself for the day. that space between waking and sleeping full of wobbles, broken walls, shifts of earth beneath my feet. how could i solve this? i presume by meditating a moment, not forcing myself into action, rolling with the punches, let the memories of the world i inhabit come back to accrue.
to quote susan m. weinscheck from One Hundred Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, a book i highly recommend, after all, we are a mystery to ourselves:
The latest research on unconscious mental processing shows that people receive 40 billion sensory inputs every second, and are consciously aware of 40 at any one time.
wow, that reminds me of time a friend's teenage daughter in the hospital for a psychotic break. leaving the hospital for the first time, she ran off down the street, her mother chasing her. obviously, she'd lost her filter and the 40 billion hit her with full force. we need to screen up to get the 40 billion down to 40. that really says something.
unfortunately, i'm usually too sleepy, mesmerized by dreaming, to put anything approaching this kind of common sense in practice. i have learned to pull back from the world as it grows black. alas, i'm often too dimwitted. and all day i'm picking up pieces of myself while trying to relate to work, school, friends, all the bits of information streaming onto my eyeballs.
