Of Mere Being
I went back to the beginning of my blogging journey and read through my first ever blog post. I remember thinking that it was one of the best pieces I’ve ever written. I mainly stuck to poetry back then, so it was fair to assume this since I didn’t have much to compare it to. With even more excerpts of poetry, a couple screenplays, and over a hundred blog posts added to my achievements, I can truly say that I needed more work with my writing ability. A gist of the post can be summed up in a few sentences: I spoke on my current daily routine and how I soon found myself going mad in the autopilot mindset I was in. I attended an earlier yoga class than I usually did that January morning, watched the sunset thereafter, and was inspired to write a post about it because for the first time ever, I felt mentally awake to the world before me.
Ever since I came to this conclusion of “predictability is drab,” I feared being one to have a daily routine. As my father would see it, though, “it keeps humans sane and grounded.” Current time, I still see routine as drab and more or less of mere survival in lieu of true living and that living in a sane mind also breads a drab life. Though, my problem soon became that I’d do anything and everything to keep from falling into a routine of any sort. I always had to have something “out of the ordinary” going on. This soon led me to a rabbit hole of angst because as I’ve come to learn, a majority of life is ordinary. Social media has a funny way of showing us this to be false though, which made this avoidance of routine even more difficult and anxiety filled.
Between being on the brink of losing my mind of pure boredom with life and angst to always have a life that was constantly going, I soon decided to loosen the reins. This was fairly recent; I’d say possibly in the Spring of this year. I’d cease my competence to over plan/organize my day to allow life to come to me, if it hadn’t showed itself, I listened to myself in what I needed in the current moment. I used to force myself to constantly stay busy and neglect my needs just to remain active in a day. This time, though, if I was tired, I took a nap, if I didn’t have anything to do, I’d go outside and enjoy the sunlight or another activity I enjoyed. I let myself exist in moments instead of forcing them to show themselves. For some time, I felt myself slipping into depression because in these moments of pure existence, I felt blank and close to empty. Then I read a poem by Wallace Stevens, Of Mere Being:
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
We often feel pressured to have an extraordinarily arbitrary life of the unknown or an extraordinary routine of some sort, there is no middle ground. But the truth is that the middle ground is where authentic life lies. More often than not, most of life is fairly mundane and underwhelming in comparison to what we are shown on social media. We’ve come so accustomed to seeing this extraordinary lifestyle that the little things in life hold no value, when in reality that is where all of our values should be placed. I wasn’t and couldn’t bring myself to enjoy the little things because I was too narrowed in on the extraordinary that I didn’t possess. When I read this of Wallace Stevens, my heart felt lighter and felt as if the vibrance of simple existence began to show itself. Though I still found myself feeling blank in the void of menial moments, I began to accept this to be true, and soon, the enjoyment of the void began to show itself. With everything we don’t obtain always being shown to us at every corner, we must constantly remind ourselves that very little is important in this world. Most of life is full of trivialities; we are eaten up by nothingness. Only when we truly accept the menial can we find contentment with the ordinary.
