Eshtine

the real

The hardest thing I've ever tried to do is nothing. I didn't expect this at all. When I decided it, or fell into it, finding myself returning to it out of need or guilt or desire, the form was just fifteen minutes of sitting in the quietest place I could find. I was to sit with eyes closed, the less to be distracted from my task, because the task I had given myself was to think of nothing. To sit, busy at no potential accomplishment, for fifteen minutes--how hard could that really be?
Harder than anything I've ever done, as it turns out. I take any excuse to avoid that daily appointment. And when I am there, 99% of the time I am willing myself elsewhere. I am thinking I am thinking of nothing but the truth is I am really recreating a snatch of conversation from earlier in the day, or I am projecting myself to a dreaded or longed-for future event. Then I must call myself back to the quiet space, the closed eyes, but I must not do so violently. I can't berate myself for getting off track, because then I will be thinking about how easily I get off track. I still won't be thinking of nothing.
So why bother to try? Because with patience and practice the noise does shut off. So much of it is noise, too--my brain babbling nonsense syllables to itself, the tune it picked as the Song of the Day, sudden pangs of emotion from childhood memories--that if I didn't know these could go away if acknowledged and then dismissed calmly, they would drive me insane. Some days they never really go away, other days I am plunged quickly into the silence underneath, the black pool on whose surface they've been floating.
Usually something tries to pull me back out again as soon as I'm in. That something could be the observer-voice--"Oh, look! You've done it! You're not thinking about anything!"--whose presence belies its message. Or it could be the anxiety-voice--"What if you're doing this wrong? What if you're just wasting your time? Don't you have anything more productive to do?". Every writerly instinct in me wants to preserve what's going on in memory, so then I find myself projected to the future again, imagining how I will be relating this to someone else. But sometimes, sometimes, and not ever for very long, a few seconds maybe, what is the dark pool will be so overwhelmingly real that I'll recognize the chattering brain noise for what it is--pale and uninteresting by comparison.
Real. A state of being I've never spent appreciable amounts of time in. Real is incredibly, overwhelmingly big, which is why the constant temptation to wall myself off from it into a vision I've invented, where I've given myself illusory control. It's too big to understand, too big to know--and yet it must be the only thing worth knowing.
Whether Real is what I touch when the little thoughts fade, I can't be sure. There is a strange intensity to it that seems similar to what I've heard is the experience of a serotonin rush. Just why serotonin would kick in is beyond me. I wish someone would study the whole phenomenon, parse it out, but it may not be possible to. Where I go, if I go past the daily triumphs and failures, past the memories of dead feelings, past the record skipping on a random snatch of melody, is where no one else can. If I tell someone else to try it, to wait out his own noise, he'll end up in his own space. And what is there may be beyond being conveyed.
We can talk in the language of senses to each other--sight, sound, touch. I can point to the blue sky and you can say, yes, I see it, blue. And I can take that experience we can share and render it into words, write about dipping my toes down into the sumptious pile of my rug and I can conjure the feeling in you. But what to say about something experienced in darkness, in silence, unmoving? Something not felt, not heard, not seen, but There all the same?