Who has the audacity
to take up this much space?
- Tiana Clark
So I was waiting on hold with the depression phoneline this month - the one with the pre-recorded greeting from New Zealand rugby icon John Kirwan with his ‘relatable masc’ affectations and adverbs (“you are real important to us, sorry we’re taking a while but things are real busy right now, but we’ll be with you real soon”) - when I realised that the waiting can be as good as the talking. Waiting meaning slowing down to the rhythm of the voice interspersed with three or four rotating musical tracks. This one - Tangaroa Whakamautai by Maisey Rika - is on just about every contact centre playlist in Aotearoa. (I saw someone joke recently that backed-up national phonelines could be a good music-sourcing alternative to Spotify). But when a lovely volunteer activated the line it was at least equally as good as the good wait.
-So what’s happening today for you?
-Well I’ve got such low energy reserves, and so much to do and so much to catch up on, and the gulf between these things gets bigger all the time and so far today I’ve only done two tiny things.
-Two things! You’ve done two things!
-Hmm.
-Two things? When you’re so low? In this world? That’s great.
-Hmm. Yeah, okay.
-Sometimes all you might wanna do is go outside and throw a rock at another rock. Or sit between two trees. Let your mind wander. That’s allowed, you know. Just be.
And then I felt better. I remembered back to last March (“it took so much to shut everything down. It can’t all just be switched back on in an instant”) and to the March before last (“some people in isolation are coping by making and some people are coping by being … I’m lodged in the being phase”). In the two years I spent in the UK I had to work (from home), but I did it in my own idiosyncratic way - in bursts and sprints, never missing a deadline or ignoring feedback, but never jamming things into a stepwise process. In essence, in the seeming wasteland of my transplanted and isolated life, I had the time to spend throwing rocks at other rocks, and I let myself do so. For me it wasn’t literal rocks but it looked like the photo up the top, on the pontoon at the local canal, bobbing on a narrow passage of water.
I let myself stay ‘lodged in the being phase’ as much as possible. In retrospect I see that it wasn’t only an I’m-unsafe-please-let-me-dissociate kind of non-activity, but an active state of just-being. “Throwing rocks at other rocks” is a legitimate space for creative thinking, for designing mental simulations, for strategising, and for incubating big and little ideas without even realising. I remember spontaneous flashes of things worthy of a scurry back home to the computer, or of things never written down but emerging in some surprising place many moons later. Let the unconscious mind turn a problem over and over and, as if by magic, an idea or path will materialise.
The time with the depression phoneline let me realise that what I am missing right now is unstructured, unscheduled time. The waiting was great because I was sitting there doing nothing, with just enough stimulation from the music and the amusing masc voice to set me off on some divergent runs. The talking was great because it reinforced the necessity of doing nothing in order to welcome thinking and feeling and free-wheeling theorising. Right now when people ask how are you I have no idea. I am an avatar. There are so many immediate stressors that there is no time to let the unconscious do the work of coming up with the creative ideas to meet the said stressors. A busy mind could be the sloppiest thing I have ever come across and I am shocked each day by the deoxygenated torpor that comes over even the most enjoyable things, like staying in touch (though I guess it is hard to keep in touch externally when one loses touch internally).
My working process is deoxygenated, too. I usually greet a blank page with absolute faith that some kind of web of words will emerge. I never worry, except, I realise, during these times that I have been too hyper-scheduled for there to be any stuff there to draw from in the rock-throwing manifold or the mind-wandering laboratory. What’s happening for me at the moment is not a depression of faulty looping ruminations, but the noise and panic of distance from myself. There was a big storm earlier this month, and it felt good to be closed in and focused on the sound of the urgent fat drops on the corrugated roof. Big tears, almost as big and bouncing as the raindrops, came down my cheeks in an astonishment of memory and joy. I am daring myself to have the audacity to take up space in my own life. Throw rocks at other rocks. Let the mind wander. I want that for you, too.
Until next month,
H x
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