Wide Awake

I wish there was a way to describe the searing clarity I feel when the euphoria of life sweeps over me. Most of the time I don’t feel it. I feel it’s absence, like something’s not quite right, like I’m caught in a dream. I’m lulled to sleep by routine, blind to the breathtaking wonder of life surrounding me. 

But there are moments, stabs of light when I see the time I’ve wasted, the beauty of what I have, and the speed at which it is slipping through my fingers. I see my reflection and I am young, wild, and free, and I want to hold on and not let go, not go into that Good Night until I have plumbed the depths, drunk the dregs, and sucked the marrow out of life. I wonder if I’m manic, or sleep deprived, or if this is really it, and the rest of the time I’m sleepwalking along with everyone else.

I wish you could feel what I feel now, instead of this flowery attempt to describe what I know you’ve felt and what I want all of us to feel all the time: these elevated moments at night when we’re hopped up on caffeine, exhaustion, and vulnerability, and we want to hold our friends forever. 

It’s so transient. It’s soon gone, and I wonder if I really saw this glimpse into eternity, or if it was just a mirage. It’s hard to stay awake. Thoreau said he never met a man who was fully awake. How could he look him in the face?

The trouble is we’ve grown up. We become tame and predictable, wearing the same clothes, telling the same jokes, using furniture the way it was intended. We’re all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper.*

There are reasons for this. We use limiting beliefs and past hurt as excuses to keep ourselves locked away. Our circle is used to us behaving like our past selves, so we remain like our past selves, carrying around a shell we have long since outgrown but can’t seem to shed.

So many actions and choices are shaped by the fear of what other people think of us. We put on disguises and play the required part – the son who does not disappoint, the supportive girlfriend, the dutiful employee – roles no one believes and no one likes, but it’s more palatable because everyone else is acting, too. 

I don’t know everything keeping you here in this half-life. I can’t pretend we have the same problems or experience. But I wonder if it matters enough to both of us, if we care enough. If we’ll give in, or give up, or feel the dull pain of conviction before being lulled back to sleep. Maybe this sounds like the inarticulate ravings of an adolescent. 

Or maybe we’ll get there. To a place that’s real, a place past self-imposed demands and the roles others expect us to play. Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning. Where the wild things are.

Many try to get there through alcohol or drugs, chemicals that lower inhibitions, allowing the monster to come out and play for the night. But it swallows them up in the end. I want to get there without stimulants or depressants, fully awake.

Even if we’ve slept through years of it, our story isn’t over. Every day we can unspool the typewriter ribbon and begin again. We can be free from the mistakes we’ve made and from the people we used to be. Free from the fear of what others would think if we were true. 

I don’t know if I’ll find it, but I’m going to the woods to live deliberately. I hope you’ll come along. There’s always room for more on the path less travelled. 

J.

*Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence

Aug. 18, 2020