The Crash

I adore Brian Cox. Talk physics to me. Whisper it in my ear.

It was bound to happen sometime.

We learn Newton's first three laws in school. Entropy, that sneaky little secret knot at the end, ties it all together.

Everything falls apart.

Life is a constant battle against entropy. We mow the yard, wash the dishes, sweep the floor. The ants fight to bring the nature back inside while we try to bar them at the door. Out in the woods, where things make sense, the trees are growing to die to grow again. It's cyclical. The fourth law tells us entropy is constant, and whatever we do will eventually be laid to waste by forces beyond our control.

Does depression makes its place at your table when you read that? Sit with it. Make a place for what you read instead of the sadness you feel. The trees are not sad.

My body has gone the way of the lawn that's been mowed too much, the horse whose wind was broke.

It's broken for a while. Where this will take me, I don't know, but I'm learning to make a place for the reality instead of all the feelings when I respond to the sensation.

I'm reminding myself that movement isn't cancelled. It has been changed. Smaller, slower, stiller. But I am still me, movement doesn't make me. The stress that led to this isn't me, even though my mind and body struggle to identify real threats - lions and tigers - from modern threats.

This was coming for a while, evident in the moments when the words I needed were like red balloons released from a toddler's hand and drifting out of reach to the sky. The tiny pieces of sand added up to make a beach, drops that made an ocean, until I was so full and still didn't listen.

The pattern is easy to see when I look back. In the same way constellations would be hard to see if we were in the midst of them, I can't blame myself for running myself down with stress and activity. Now... now, I must be still, so I can chart my course to whatever the next destination will be. Never has there been a better time to seek stillness, quietness, smallness, than now.

Being ill - with whatever is actually it is that makes me feel this way deep into the tissues that never see the light - has forced me to be willing to allow myself to evolve. Can I embrace whatever new me lies ahead? Yes. I hope I can carry so much of the old me along.

If there is a lesson here, it's this: Stillness can be a movement, too.