What if your body already knows?
Ok, delete that. It does sound way more new age that I am, or at least than what I want to be. What if you already know? What if you, in some place inside, know what’s going on, what’s the answer to that question that comes again at night (and at lunch break and at waking up and at falling asleep). What if you know, but you have forgotten where to look for whatever answer you might possibly have?
How could you possibly get there again?
Another full stop here. M. told me recently that she likes my writing when it comes from my nostalgia. I wonder if that is pushing me now to write as if this would be some sort of come back, as if all what we need to do for our present is to go back to some past when we already knew. A past where we were pure and wise and simple. A sort of lost paradise when we just did what we did and it was good.
We do know that we didn’t think that much, back then. We know that we did stuff faster and with less thinking. And we also know that we suffered the consequences. We didn’t have more answers then than today, we followed tensions and punctions that we didn’t know where they came from, and that we certainly didn’t know where would they lead us. Look further and remember the persons we hurt, the paths we did not explore, all what we lost. So no. Any nostalgia is -also- the nostalgia for a time that did not exist as we would like it did. If we know, if our body really knows, if somewhere inside us something knows, it is not in some sort of time capsule.
But it is still inside.
I do believe that to grow older is to add stuff. Layers upon layers of experiences, friends, things… you name it. Yet the metaphors of the layer can only bring us so far. This layers of us do interact with each other, do change the deeper ones and modulate the ones above. Our experiences are moderated by our past, and will, on their own ways, moderate our future. So it can be that this core, this place inside, is not the same that we had some years, of decennia, back. It can be that it changes, even if so subtle, every time we add some stuff on top. A new car, a house, a friend, a job. We are not the same, not in the surface and neither deep down.
And then again, deep down we know.
So M. asks what to do when we are the balloons that are left to go. What to do when we don’t have the agency of letting loose… but we are the ones let loose? So having written about layers and knowledge, having suggested that there is some part of us that process and distille all what we add to ourselves, you know that I am going to say that M. actually knows what to do. She needs to hear herself, needs to reach out, or even better, needs to reach in to herself and figure out, because she already knows. But, myself having been left to fly alone so many times, I remember the pain and the desolation and the solitude. Perhaps is good not to be such sanctimonious dick.
What I like of the balloon image is that we do know what the core of the balloon is. A balloon will fly, because she is light and she belongs into the air. Perhaps for some time, for so long time, balloons might stay tied down, making kids and adults happy. But sooner or later they will fly away, into the open sky.
Perhaps is good to embrace our nature, M., and fly away.