Rudderless Seal

My bathroom is arranged in such a way that everything is a constant state of teetering. Soap dishes, shower shelves, ledges, sink edges, are all either too narrow or slope inward or outward too much, so that nothing is safe from the potential to fall. Razors, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, combs all have de-edged themselves and toppled into either the sink water, the bath water, or worse, the toilet. All it takes is a movement of any kind on my part to send one of those things into one of the three pits of germs and soap scum.

Any movement.

It’s like the bathroom was designed specifically for this feat. It’s a backwards Rube Goldberg machine whose function is not to bring a simple result out of the chaos of cause and effect, but to take a simple thing like a bottle of aftershave and through a tangle of angles, slopes, and the carefully measured placement of a number of basins, to bring out a particularly vile brand of chaos. And what it does to me, even on my better days, is to reduce me to a simpering slobbering mess of frustration. I mean, it’s not like my elbow brushes across the sink top and connects with a bunch of toiletries that I have carelessly left bunched up and dripping onto the floor. It can be a single comb which seems safe one instant, and through just the wind of my hand over it, loses it’s balance on the devil’s porcelain and splashes into a conveniently unflushed toilet.

Do I make the picture clear enough?

I’ve been on edge lately. As Anastasia says, a “rudderless seal”. All this great and overwhelming lack of structure is pointing out to me how convenient it was to hide behind the mantle of “someday”, to keep working at a job I kept planning to leave, and yet by not leaving, to keep myself in a constant state of knowing that something else was right around the corner. It was the potential I was living in, the fact that I might be unhappy with what I was doing but that I was only doing it to pay off debt, to move to another city, to help put my wife through school, to bide my time while things changed around me in such a way that they would magically reveal the perfect next step and I would be free.

Now, suddenly, I am in that next step and it wasn’t the next step I thought I was waiting for. I know that the choice I have to make with what to do with my life cannot be the safe “this will do until” bet, because I’ve just done that. And it did do until. Now is that until, in fact. And what’s more, choosing another “do until” won’t work either. Because I know that Until never, ever comes. It’s only a self-delusion.

Oh, there are of course exceptions, but they all depend on having something concrete with which to fill in the “this will do until….” blank. Otherwise, if you spend all your time waiting for the world to change to accept you into some mythical future flow, it will do just that – change around you or in other words, despite you. It’s never the right time, and nothing will ever come together to make it the right time. It’s always the right time, because the number of right times is diminishing away from your life quickly. Just take one. They are all the same.

So I am here on the other side, wondering what I was waiting for, because that’s the thing I should be doing next. And I have this sense of teetering, of uneasy formlessness, of certain impermanence. I’m frequently miserable. I’m lost and confused and easily muddied. At times, it feels like I am on the edge of toilets and sinks and bathwater while some invisible hand is moving above me. And yet I know that this is only a changeable perception.

The thing about releasing yourself from struggle, about giving yourself lovingkindness, about removing attachments, about surrendering is that conceptually it is very easy to understand. What you have to do in order to move to that place can be held in the brain with the same amount of effort it would take you to remember how to boil eggs. The actual getting from point to point, however, involves using muscles that you have to invent along the way. And what’s more, while doing it, you know that you are only using those muscles because you think you should use them, and even further, that those muscles probably don’t exist… and neither does the struggle. But, if you could see through the illusion of your own struggle to struggle, you’d already have done it and wouldn’t need to do it.

Now do I make the picture clear enough?

The only person who will ever keep me away from being everything I could be is myself, through a perception that I can be nothing at all or through a belief that I will never be good enough, ready enough, or brave enough… or that the time will never come, or has already gone. In truth, it’s starting where you are, not limiting, and picking a perception that says “not only can I do this, but I will do this because that’s what I want to do.”

I’ll keep repeating it until I read it myself and think “Oh, what a grand idea!”

I spent several hours today singing for a second Blonde Swedes cover album project. We figure one every 15 years is good enough. At any rate, it was heaven because of several factors. It was something I did that I didn’t care how good or bad I was with it, that I had no idea why I was doing it, that I really didn’t know when I was done with it, and that no matter what I did, it would be met with glee all around. Sounds like formlessness to me, and I was very content within it.

What’s the difference between that and anything else, then? I cannot seem to achieve this state in other areas of my life, or in other manner of art or writing or performance. The big brain sweeps in and wants to know good, why, goal, better, feedback, growth, process, plan, discipline, why again, meaning, purpose, life path, outline, technique, method, wasting time, tomorrow, next year, validity. And all this just gums up the works and leaves me searching and reaching and running in little circles. And the big, wide world, bigger and wider and worldier than it has ever seemed to be before, sits outside my door in all it’s bigness, wideness and worldliness. Life is changing around me.

So, I guess since I can’t fix the sink and the shower and the toilet, and I can’t stop using the bathroom or my toiletries, the only thing I can do is not care so much if something topples. It’s bound to eventually, and probably will often.

That’s how the whole thing was made, after all. The worst that can happen is you get wet.