Uncomfortably Numb

Image: Fall Leaves in my back yard, October 22, 2024

In the last month, I have experienced a number of milestone events. Our fourth grandson was born, we attended the wedding of our nephew, and a colleague just a few years older than me passed away unexpectedly. I would like to say that these events have inspired me as a writer, but quite the opposite: I find that words are inadequate to capture the emotional impact and self-reflection that occurs at moments like this. In some strange way, it is easier to fictionalize these experiences than to write about them as they happen.

Image: Fall leaves in my back yard, November 3, 2024.

One of the truths I have discovered from the congruency of these events is that I cannot turn off the observer in my head to just experience the moment. I watch, sometimes enviously, at the people standing in the line to talk with the surviving family or dancing at the reception, and wonder How do they do it? Maybe everyone lives in their head, but I was certainly born missing the gene that connects my body to music. I cannot clap in time to the beat, let alone dance. When I watch a crowded dance floor and see dancers using the same moves and gestures, I wonder where I was when the directions were passed out. These people have hand moves and head bobs and shimmies and shakes and my body is numb.

My body is numb for real. At least my feet are. My left foot is numb to about two inches above my ankle, and my right foot is numb to the ball of my foot. If you tell a doctor that your feet are numb, the first thing they will do is stick you with a needle until they believe you really do not feel it, and then they send you to a specialist. The specialist, who is also a doctor, will immediately stick you with a needle, and then try running electric current into your nerves to see if you feel that before sending you on to another specialist. The whole thing repeats for about a year and then the first doctor you saw says they have no idea, but it probably won't kill you. 'Indeterminate cause' is doctor speak for "we don't know."

When I read Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Otherness (in college, of course) I did not get a hell of a lot out it, but one thing that stuck with me was that you can exist in any state of being until you become conscious of it and then you become an observer (of yourself) and you are no longer in that state of being. So, if you are happy, and then you think 'I am happy' you are now playing at being happy because you are observing yourself being happy.

When I'm in a group experience, I'm just confused. According to Sartre, though, because I'm aware I'm confused, then I'm just playing at being confused, and no longer actually confused.

The pictures on this post were taken two weeks apart. I find that second picture depressing. I like things that are bleak, but that is not bare enough to suggest the world has entered the moment of rest for future renewal. This is the stage where everything is fighting like hell to hold on, but we know it can't. But have you ever seen such a luscious blue sky?

Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!