trip zero

i’m working on a personal statement/whistlestop tour of my past five years.
here’s a sneak peek.
tell me what you think.
——
It has taken me years to be able to articulate even a piece of what opened up for me that morning, but it was something like this: I saw that all of my doubts and anxieties were the byproduct of trying to understand more than it was actually possible to process at once. I saw how choices that seemed completely random, when I was making them, were part of a clear developmental trajectory, but the connections were only visible in retrospect. This was not due to a lack of intelligence or effort on my part, but simply a consequence of the fact that patterns take time to emerge. I saw that this was equally true in the present, and it was a waste of energy to worry too much about figuring out where I was headed. I simply needed to trust my instincts, and surrender to what was already unfolding. This insight was so clear that there was no need to analyze it. The spinning wheels in my mind could simply stop, and in the peace that descended, I was a child again, playful and in awe of the world around me. I watched carpets rise and fall with my breath, cast imaginary shadows in imaginary beams of light, invented a crazy story about how the pizza in the basement opened a portal to a parallel dimension, whistled the sun up over the lake as shafts of light pierced the clouds with each note, and baked a single biscuit, just to see if I could get the proportions right. The oven had a glass window and I watched my biscuit bake from start to finish, then woke a friend to take it out for me, because I had made a rule that I wasn’t allowed to touch anything sharp or hot. The biscuit finished baking at 7:17, and when I looked at the numbers on the digital clock, I saw the 7’s as backwards gammas (I was into the greek alphabet at the time), and thus I read the word “gig”, and the final lesson before I started floating down was “just find something you love and do it.”

I slept more deeply that night than I had in years, and awoke feeling reborn.