Time to Write

Timothy O'Neill
Sep 9, 2018 · 4 min read

What time is it? Now o'clock? I suppose I better get writing. With nothing to say. I’ve filled pages of notebooks with comments and observations on writing or not writing. What it is to me. What it is, period.

I feel like the topics and ideas I rage about are totally settled issues in the future and that I’m in a time warp, desperately trying to get up to speed before I get stranded in the past.

Don’t be bitter. That’s a sour stomach you have right there.

We’ve got eyes on. Stay frosty.

Annnnnndd, the snowman melts.

Then refreezes halfway through his melting and looks like a candle made of slush.

What did you ever do for me?

What ever it took. You know this.

Lash out, apologize. Lash out, apologize.

Trouble with ignoring the repetitive apologies is that I believe them. I believe almost all of them were at least partially sincere.

And I believe the lashing out less, because your targets keep on shifting and a man can only sustain this intensity of internal rage if his ultimate target is himself.

I know how that sounds.

To me.

I won’t assume how that sounds to you.

You, you, you.

It’s like I expect to be read.

And I do.

Can a person be selectively honest and still say they are honest?

A rigid mind has trouble seeing things outside of its comfort zone. And if things are seen, they are often excused or rationalized in a way that does not disturb the carefully cultivated ecosystem that is one’s identity. The one we carry with us, and the one no less arbitrary than the names we were given around the time of our birth.

What won’t bend, or is super flexible so that it can bend and stretch into all sorts of shapes to fit all sorts of moulds, must be broken.

So they say.

Always just enough truth in their lies to satisfy the reasoning part of your brain that you use to navigate the external manifestation of those very lies.

Our lies.

It’s tricky.

I just poured heavy cream into my cup of green tea and now it tastes a bit like clam chowder. I will continue drinking it.

Because I don’t know where the middle is. What is indecision and what is compromise?

I thought it couldn’t hurt to add some heavy cream to my tea. And I don’t think it does hurt. But at the same time, part of me wants nothing to do with it. Pour it down the drain, it’s just tea! Ah yes, but I prepared the tea and should I waste what I made just because it tastes a little funky? But is that part of a faulty scarcity mindset? Those messages that sound sensible and humane on the surface but are actually trojan horses carrying guilt and greed and other tools of emotional manipulation? Other tools of, dare I say it, indentured servitude?

Months ago I had a very interesting experience. I woke up not long after going to bed and I could barely feel my body. It was lying on its back, head on the pillow, maintaining its normal functions. Where was I? I was a crackling ball of energy in the corner of my left eye. I was not man or woman, young or old. I was pure consciousness. The morning after this experience I felt like I had arrived at an essential truth, that I was not the character I’ve been playing on this stage. Or that I was both more, and less than, the body suit. For a day I felt the strangeness of this situation, of experiencing pure being apart from any tangible, fleshy points of reference. And still having to play the part of Timothy. But after enough time back on the ground, being Timothy, I fell back into the groove of waking life. And the power of that nighttime experience faded.

So knowing that I am not just ‘this’, how was I to live authentically? Unless I was to continue to wear the mask for good reasons I can only guess at?

It is difficult to live in truth when you realize that the things you cling on to most dearly because of affection, attachment and delusion, are the things that were placed in your life in order to produce a negative, dense level of being. A state that would hinder your spiritual growth.

Or create a catalyst for urgent action.

And I cling because it is the only thing that makes me feel like I have a conscience. A heart. Or that I am worthy to be alive.

And I am.

And it is impossible to be unworthy of life.

Impossible.

Let’s carry on.