When You Don’t Know What to Do.
Do Nothing
Dear friend,
I’ll never get used to air travel.
You wake up in one country, another culture, the heat, the food, the language.
The threads that go all the way to the very beginning.
The generation that held you as you cried out and took your first breath. The ones who rushed you to the hospital when you fell hard and lay limp, but breathing.
Wove their world around you.
The ones you love and you don’t have the words to express it. Language only goes so deep and these are the uncharted depths of the wildest seas.
You say your hurried goodbyes and you’re lost for a way to say how your heart is breaking.
You sit in a metal tube, place your microchipped papers on the machines and they scan the bones and flesh of your face.
The gates open and you’ll sleep in another time and place.
Awake to another reality.
The noise and the dirt and sham of the city will hook an arm around your shoulders and try to sell you its tawdry grot.
You won’t buy it.
The world will swallow you whole.
But you will remain whole in the belly of the whale, as on the shore that awaits.
I’m sitting with Angelo watching the Olympics, thinking maybe it’s time I took up a marshall art again. Something to keep the energy flowing, let the false self dissolve in the discipline of it.
The television pulls at my mind.
Mass mind control.
We don’t realise the power of it.
One of the Olympic coaches was speaking on the tv last night. He said we have to stop talking about medals and recognise the difference is a hundredth of a second. Less than the time it takes to draw a single breath. He said we ought rather to celebrate and recognise the dedication it takes for every athlete to compete at this level.
The tv hosts nodded and blinked and continued with their, our, obsession with winners and losers.
How many golds?
Then it’s car ads and pain killers.
You think you’ve reached your limit but it’s only confusion.
The world is a cacophony of voices.
When you don’t know what to do, take a breath.
Do nothing.
Something will happen.
You will be fine.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey