October Newsletter: Everything's Fine (Patreon)

The other day a friend of mine with long COVID wrote me telling me his frustration with where he was at, with his expectations for his body versus what it was able to do, with realizing it was Sunday and he’d spent another week in a haze. “Objectively I’m doing fine, it’s just disappointing where ‘fine’ is,” he said.

I did something dangerous last month, which was to fall into a flow. Get up, jog, breakfast, meditate, kitchen work, drive to studio, five hours of work, drive home, dinner, a half-hour’s relaxing, dishes, a snack, and bed. I imagined I would burn out quickly, but instead I found I enjoyed it, the rigor which pushed me to challenge my body and spirit. I found energy I didn’t know I had, and every day we were doing something in the studio worth being glad about. I fell into habits, overeating, overplanning, and said, “at the end of the month I’ll go back to before.”

Cue the end of the month. For the past week I’ve been slowly recalibrating my mind not to map out my day minute by minute as soon as I wake up. I can feel the energy coiled up at the back of my skull, pinching out the present moment, generating a continual judgement of not good enough, not fast enough, generally not enough. It takes real effort to move towards peace in stillness when you’ve been running to keep up with the flow. There’s a ghost of myself still running, pulling at me as my daily life turns back to smaller tasks that keep me at home. Yesterday I sat and watched a stream endlessly pushing against a rock, dissolving it by imperceptible degrees. It's hard to feel things dissolve - a structure, a habit, a friction of muscle and bone.

Okay, I’m on my third draft of this and I still don’t have a great sign-off, so for now I’ll just say I hope all of you are well, and I’m looking forward to getting back into the Patreon flow. I’ll let you know next month how the stillness is going.