Food for thought:
How many Marcus Aurelius’s, Seneca’s, and Epictetus’s were there, with wise and peaceful lives, whose thoughts should have lived on and influenced and helped others for millenia, but were discarded because they were of normal social and economic standing? Or were lost because the authors themselves were content with life, and thus content to simply live?
A brain breaks:
I think it just felt fuzzy honestly, getting hit in the head. More like “whoa, what happened”, then a lot of “oh yeah I’m okay. Check your aim next time!”. “Okay”, I think, “I got nailed in the temple by a tennis ball from two feet away, not a big deal, whatever”. So I continued on with my Father’s day, and won a surprising amount of lawn games. It wasn’t until we got in the car to head home from my parent’s house that I realized driving was making me nauseous. Like really really nauseous. My only comparison would be to when I first dropped acid in an offshoot of Zion. My friends and I stared at the canyons for 8 hours and watched the vermillion hues swirl into each other like a living painting. Then we we got up to leave, we got into the car, and the second we started moving at 5 mph, the landscape around us was melting in a way that made us all nauseous. We camped in a cold car that night, with only a couple hammocks for blankets.
I pull over. “Hey,” I tell my partner, “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to drive home, something is wrong with my head. I think maybe I have a concussion”. So we switch and head home. The next few weeks are filled with surprises…
I don’t think I’ve ever understood what its like to have a brain injury. I can best describe it as a clear betrayal of the mind towards everything you try to accomplish. Bright lights? No. Loud noises? No. Screens? Definitely not. Music? The absolute worst. Walking is, okay-ish.The balancing function doesn’t seem to work quite right, so instead of the grace of a cat I’m somewhere between very tipsy and drunk. It still works, but its not good, by any stretch of the imagination. I have to keep telling the cats not to meow because it hurts my head. I can pick up a fork, but again, it isn’t great. Handling a knife? No chance. Reading fiction, however, I can do without hurting my head much. So I do it.
For the next two weeks I’m reading a book or more a day, its some lighter stuff but I made it through about 10000 pages. I start being able to handle things a bit better, and a bit better. Somehow my utterly dysfunctional walking unlocks some issues I have been carrying in my lower back for probably a decade, so I learn to walk differently with better patterning. Walking a block or two is utterly exhausting, but I struggle through. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right? Not allowed to drink caffeine? Alright, guess I’ll kick my caffeine addiction. Not allowed to drink alcohol? Alright I guess I’ll kick my one drink a day after training habit. Not allowed to watch television or listen to music? Alright, guess I’ll kick my video watching addiction. In a weird way, its probably one of the nicest methods to detox all your bad habits.
In a strange way, I dissolve and I come back. Dissolution. I lose all the binding threads that were pulling me, and I get to choose what to pick back up. Resistance training comes back. The reading stays back. I return to watching a little bit of TV, but its mostly series I’ve cared about for a long time (i.e. Stranger Things), and not just a time filler. I notice all the little things that were long burned in Dopamine-seeking habits at the cost of me, and I’m choosing not to engage with them. Every once in a while I do, and its easy to see pull of the addiction for the following day or two. The dopamine rip current of the internet feels like methamphetamines to me, imploring me to watch an irrelevant twenty minute video on something that doesn’t affect me, or argue about something incorrect and unimportant someone has posted on a random forum. Its wild that this incredible addictive technology is given out to children and adults in whatever doses they want, and just allowed to run rampant. I’ve read the white papers and books and watched the documentaries on the attention addiction from social media, but I’ve never been more convinced about it than now, watching my wants after the long detox.
To quote myself from a bit above, it feels like losing almost all of my self definition modules, and getting to pick them back up slowly after the fuzziness wears away. I’m reminded of the Stoics and the Enchiridion:
With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.
My self-definitions are, in fact, just transient objects to me, and now that they have briefly left me, I can respect them as such and treat them as such. Some of them don’t scream at me as they used to try to solidify their importance. I don’t feel like I need to juggle them as much. And most importantly I feel like I found some intrinsic self definition underneath all the other self definitions, something invariant even to the partial scale collapse of my brain. And that thing, I have decided I will call “Slevin”. And I think he and I are going to have a marvelous adventure together.