Man can’t sit alone quiet in a room because to live is to direct your attention, which could be more aptly labeled your life force. You become almost sick with energy if you keep still too long. There is nowhere else to flow it.
It’s like we’ve fallen in love with things that take away energy. It’s like we see energy as a burden rather than a blessing. How about that! All too eager to give it away. Maybe this is the whole idea behind the original sin, where you are condemned to work. Just as one is condemned to be free, one is condemned to expend energy.
Once I wrote about emotive differentials. Where emotion is a differential between your current state and desired state, that agitates you more and more until you act. So if you ban yourself from easy expenditures, the hard ones are, naturally, all that are left. Maybe they become easy in time. Still, the differential required to, say, read a book, may be too high. You may be too spongy to ever bother. So you don’t do it.
…But that doesn’t stop the differential agitation. There are no other valves to release. The pressure builds until you have to pick up a book. The pressure sustains. You have to get used to having this excess energy when you no longer give it away. At first it’s uncomfortable, but it also makes you feel alive.
As I circle my room, spare stick as instrument, I finally see the room for once. It doesn’t fade away; and it usually does because I spend all of my differential energy on tedious time passings, small vampires. With those gone, the differential will force you to explore all routes to sate itself. This current differential, that which pushes me to write, also clues me in on my heart: it beats, and I am in a trite awe of how, if it stops, I am dead. Awe nevertheless. Nothing around me changed, but such realizations sets something off internally. Your lifeforce, field of vision, internal vision: each one begins to expand in service of satiation.
It is worth wondering: why do you need anything external when you can take yourself from Iceland to Bombay with Patagonia to spare, instantaneously? But I’m being a bit facetious here, as it would be your version of such places. Still, you don’t have to direct outward — you’ve an inner eye too.
There’s someone out there right now looking wistful under streetlight. You can hear the bell swing with an exit from the boulangerie. There’s a puddle disrupted off 3rd and Manhattan, and a ball entrance unfolding. The greyhounds bark away in the aristocratic field, and el niño is bound for the playground, mirage leading the way.