Why Calm
If so, it is so ‘of its time’. Totally appropriate.
A terrible thing has been done.
To us. To all of us. To each and every individual one of us. No one has been spared.
We have been seduced into wanting more. Way, way, way, more than we could ever hold. We have been sold a bill of goods: cheated, if you will. Tricked. Swindled. Duped. Grifted. Hoodwinked.
We have been told we can have it all. All of it. Every last scrap of it. We deserve it. You are worth it. Worth the credit, the mortgage, the Bitcoin, the fame, the body, the surgery, the child, the love, the lover, the orgasm, the mansion, the six-pack, the shoes, the beach, the list goes on and on and you, we, I, all of us, we keep pulling the list towards ourselves, never finding the point where it is enough.
We lift, heave, ourselves up and out of reality in our wanting more, more, more, more. Madly scrabbling and reaching out to get to the end of the list.... We never believe that anything could ever be enough.
More food. More money. More love. More dreams. More music. More movies.
And we want it all NOW. Right NOW. Actually, NOW is not quick enough. Instant gratification no longer cuts the mustard. The hunger is rampant and insatiable. It gallops and roars around, randomly now, mouth agape, bigger than a whale! The insatiable need for more.…
I am exhausted just trying to describe your gorging hunger.
It is so utterly rampant that it has become furious.
And now it begins to hurt as you are quietly becoming aware of how awful this pain actually is.
You begin to notice, in small moments, that there is no peace, there is no stilling or silencing the beast of longing that has been created in this time.
You can feel the ranging pacing, the swaying of the need, the rocking side-to-side as you try to rise further up, lean further in, step closer to feeling full, satiated, replete.
Feeling full is a hollow promise. It is an impossibility, an illusion.…
We sit back together now. Your hand in mine.
‘How did we get here?’ You ask, turning to me.
‘More, importantly, how do we get out of here?’ I answer.
We are living in the most accelerated times. Have you noticed the speed of time? It is roaring through, and we are being pulled so fast that our hair is flying, we can barely catch our breath, our eyes are streaming with the stinging speed.
Why calm? Because the speed is seductive, mesmeric, over-bearing, furious and we have no idea how to jump off.
It is so stunning, quite how much we fear stopping, jumping away. What will we find if we do? It is nail-bitingly terrifying to think of being forced to bear calm.
Our current lexicon includes a wonderful word, entirely rooted in this speed analogy: bandwidth.
Our bandwidth cannot cope with stillness. We need to check our phones, we have to write an email, we are in the middle of binge watching a tv series, we have to check we locked the back door... 10 times.... We cannot sit still for fear....
For fear. Nothing else. We have been exponentially hyped-up to speeds of mind and body never-before-seen.
You could just say that you don’t have the time or the bandwidth for calm and turn away. You would be proving my point, but you would then miss the other side.
Why Calm?
To learn how to be calm, yes, it is something that has to be learned, and it is oh, oh, oh, so easy to forget how.
Rather like sugar. Have you ever been entranced by sugar? It creeps up on you, overtakes you, and nibble by nibble, slice by slices, bite by bite and spoonful by spoonful you are detained by sugar in all its lascivious forms.
You are lost now, I know. I can tell. You are thinking of lovely little crispy pink sugar mice, how they would feel in your mouth, or maybe remembering flying saucers, mars bars... the enchanting trance of too much sugar.
We were talking about the seductive and mesmeric, overbearing and furious speed of life. Maybe you do both! The speed of life and the sugar! So many do. They seem to go so nicely hand in hand, skipping off down the road.....
Why calm? Because we are worthy of untold gifts. We are worthy of so much that comes with the ability to bear calm.
Thank you for these raw, powerful and wise words Carolyne
I overuse 'depleted' in my everyday talking and thinking, so thank you for awakening 'replete' in me; will aim to use it to influence my daily vibrancy in being, rather than doing.
Much love and calm to you x
Scary/horrible & I was just thinking of sugar, & thinking & eating it, I thought if I fed it, it would be satisfied but it wasn’t, sugar just wanted more & more - I’m thinking what would be so opposite, I thought water but then I began to think of cordial, there is no end except my will.