When It Rains, It Pours (Into You)

“I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and colour to one’s loves and friendships.”

–Kay Redfield-Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

There is calm in the eye of the storm
Peace amidst the chaos
Balance in the imbalance
And you within me

Do You Boil Your Water?

Lately, I’ve come to envision my mind as water in a pot over a stove, and in a particularly large pot too. While it’s usually pretty calm or even just at a steady, slow bubbling, it has been known to splosh around, hissing and spitting, jumping out of its normal confines only to sizzle and evaporate on the hot stove. Usually the new activity is the result of a slow and steady rising heat, again being brought to a slow but predictable boil. Recently, however, there’s been a hell of a lot activity up there and I know it’s only a matter of time before it overflows onto the hot stove. Whether it will evaporate or simply hiss and spit from the sheer amount of over-spill remains to be seen.

I feel like I’m on the verge of something…major that’s about to happen. I can’t explain it. I have this sense of forboding, of excitement and terror rolled into one already over-crammed brain and there are many moments of complete clarity and just as many moments of complete chaos, mentally. Certain things I’ve been working on as of late require my stability and consistency of thought/effort, but it’s a hard thing to maintain when certain other aspects of one’s life inspires a fight/flight response. I don’t know what is around the corner, have no idea of what is in store, but at the same time there’s a sense of inevitability in so many other aspects. It’s a yin and yang, if you will, of the different compartments of life, but I suspect that they won’t remain balanced for too long.

I’ve never been wrong about these sort of things when it comes to my own lifepath, which is worrisome in itself, but that coupled with my mind’s “water” being at the hottest it’s ever been was responsible for my first major anxiety attack last week. I don’t know what’s going on…there was such calm for so long…

All I can say is that the end-result had better be a hell of a change…and for the better this time.