The simplest of things
or, a sensitive little bean.
I’m a sensitive little bean. Always have been. By the time I hit 25 I was already on my third existential crisis. Life just seemed so bewildering, so difficult. I couldn’t get my head round any of its brutality or injustice, and I felt everything.
Every cry of pain or signal of distress on the outside ran through me like barbed wire on the inside. Every harm in this wounded world cut me to the core.
HOW? How was I meant to survive like this? It was a question that took years to answer.
To counteract the overwhelm I would take refuge in my imagination. I would take myself somewhere else, a place of beauty, a place of fantasy. Like a hobbit from the ‘shire I went on adventures, only my adventures were through the mind and into other realms.
I disassociated. I distracted. My nickname growing up was ‘space cadet’ because I wasn’t present. I wasn’t there. I watched television for hours, because in the flickering screen a world beyond mine existed that gifted me moments of respite. Disassociation and distraction built a life raft I could cling to, but it came at a price, because I also sailed away from the good stuff. By hiding away from the bad, I hid myself from the good, and in doing so, depression became the new destination: a place with no feeling at all.
Trial and error, anxiety, heartbreak, beauty and joy all led me to redemption. Freedom came not through anything complicated or esoteric, but in the discovery of Presence, and of Simplicity. These words and their embodiment led me through the gateway into a life no longer governed by anguish.
Now, only moments of beauty have permission to reach my core. Moments when the sun is on my face, when I hear strangers roar with laughter, when my pooch kisses me all over, rapturous at my return from taking the bins out. I realised that even the simplest of things are the most extraordinary when you pay attention to them: the hug from my papa bear on a day he knows me, a soft Summer breeze in my hair after a long indoors; a juicy, garden-picked strawberry in my hungry mouth. I savour these moments with every fibre of my being. This attention, this permission to stand still and be fully immersed in Presence and Simplicity has been my saving grace.
I’ve learned to accept the vast feeling self that I am and to ride the waves of sensitivity with grace. It’s a path that still needs careful navigation, but the difference now is I live. I’m here. I sit with the difficult, the bad, the hurting, and I don’t shoo these visitors away, but I also make sure they don’t outstay their welcome. Their home is not within me, so they are denied an invitation to reside there. Once they have departed, I turn and lean on the shoulders of their sister feelings: the peaceful, the beautiful, the loving, and I breathe these in fully. I expand into them through an ever-changing landscape of breathing, being, exhaling, witnessing.
I learned that for every round of gunfire, there is the sweetest birdsong. For every angry word, there is a fervent kiss. For every act of selfishness, there is an act of astonishing sacrifice. We may be warring people, murderous people, dark people. But we are also beautiful people, gifted people, and loving people. We are extraordinary beings living a life of true polarity, and without the hard, the difficult, the cruel, would we ever truly know the joyous, the beautiful, the loving?