I just recommended the Artist Way by Julia or Julie Cameron to a friend on Facebook. Now, most of the people on my personal FB page are friends from high school. I went to a weird, freak high school where people have stayed in touch with each other over the years. We still have a pretty good turnout for both kids and teachers at our reunions. Although, they’ve gotten grayer as the years have moved on.
I stumbled on the Artist Way due to a recommendation from my bff. It literally was a necessary thing at a period in my life when I needed it. I wrote stream of consciousness in the mornings for almost three years. Probably longer than I thought I needed, but looking back far shorter than I should have. My mother’s death, wherein I went into a deep, dark depression fora few years probably could’ve benefited from journaling every morning. I forgot during that period as I was in survival mode. I wish I had kept up the writing so it would’ve already been there. I have given a lot of thought to getting back to it.
I still take myself on dates and buy myself presents. I spend ALL of my $10. I leveled up from $5 because inflation, yo.
Weirdly, the one other thing which has helped my mind is an amalgamation of a short story I read in 9th grade and something I read many years later. When I was in 9th grade, Mrs. Sinclair, who was my 9th grade English teacher gave us tons of short stories throughout the year. The one I remember in relation to this thought was one that was a science fiction. It was about the invention of teleportation. Humans has invented a teleporter. But in order to have living things alive from one point to the other, anything alive had to be put to sleep. So, you are put to sleep, you are teleported, and then you wake up. Less than a minute or two. A smarty pants boys wanted to know how and why a person had to be asleep to teleport. So, he took drugs or somehow concocted to stay awake during the teleportation. He ended up completely insane when he arrived on the other side.
Although the teleportation took only a second or two, the human mind when it teleports and doesn’t have a frame of reference perceives it as infinity. His brain had live an infinite amount of time… alone and in a vacuum. He came out insane. In case you have figured it out by now, humans are community species. We are built to live together with others. otherwise, bad things happen.
The second thing which hammered this home was Stephen Covey’s first 7 Habits book. I don’t remember anything else about that book today. But I remember this: Infinity resides in the space between action and reaction. The old ways of doing something doesn’t need to be kept because you have all the time and choices in the world as you sit in that space between the initial action and the attendant reaction.
When you put that together with the short story, you get a complete thought, in my mind at least.
Now, when you put all this together, using stream of consciousness writing to help your brain gain more time between action and reaction. Making that period of time go in slo-mo.
Anyway, I woke up this morning thinking these things and thought I would share them with you.
Infinity resides in that space between breathes.
