I don’t want to be writing this.
I don’t want to produce anything right now. I don’t feel like I have anything of value to share. I can certainly see the irony in that. I know that it’s often precisely in moments like this, (when mood is low, energy is flat, and a sense of purpose feels distant), that something raw and relatable is available.
My current experience feels incredibly dense. If it were a color, it would be dingy white. The shade of white that my mind interprets as just soiled, bland, and cold. Like the three-day old snow covering all the beautiful places I want to walk. Like a blankness that doesn’t feel like possibility, but like barrenness. The story my mind tells about this white density is that it’s meaningless. Potential-less. A complete and utter dead end.
And even so, all of this is welcome.
This, too, is part of the human experience. The heaviness. The inability to name what’s wrong. The sense that there’s a problem without an identifiable source. When this is unconditionally allowed and not forcefully pushed away or rushed to be understood, sometimes something settles. Not necessarily into clarity. And really not into any lasting sense of relief (as if relief can be lasting). But there's just a quieter honesty.
Right now, thoughts move like a slow lament. Somber. Melancholy. And still, something is holding all of this. Even as it feels like wading through waist deep, icy, mucky water, there's a recognition that the stinging I'm feeling is somehow sacred. The very fact that this unpleasantness is even appearing points to something deeper that’s making it all possible.
There is an animating force underlying and propping up this density. I experience it as a benevolent intelligence... a deep hum... that doesn’t require my understanding. It’s the same energy that makes impermanence possible. The same energy animating the alarm bells in my body-mind that insist something needs to be fixed. Those alarms aren’t enemies. They are also expressions of this intelligence, doing what they’re designed to do.
And quite honestly, I don’t feel like following them anywhere.
There’s a very human part of me that wants to stay exactly where I am. In the familiarity of blaring misery. Because (according to my mind) at least misery is known. At least it’s predictable. This is one of the more troublesome quirks of the mind: distracting from an uncertain experience with a (pretty rotten) familiar one.
Right now, it’s enough for me to just notice what's happening and to see how distorted my perceptual lens is. It's enough to see the selfing mechanism churning away, doing what it evolved to do in the name of survival. This isn’t unique. This isn’t personal. And this most certainly isn’t new.
So I’m sharing this transient experience not to offer insight or resolution, but as a form of contact. A reaching out toward another seemingly separate human who may be experiencing some version of this same malaise. If the vibration of these words carry anything, let it be companionship. Let it be a reminder that even when experience feels like all there is, it’s not the whole of what we are.
We are so much more than our thoughts, moods, feelings, and behaviors. And even in moments when there’s no desire to look beyond those experiences, something deeper is still quietly present. Holding. Allowing. Making room for it all.
For now, that’s enough.