If it were me reading the signs.

from happy 2 b sad

Aloneness forces a sticky form of self-absorption. Gross. Ugh, bad practice.

Its all going in circles again. Hey, wasn’t it this time last year when I was also sobbing uncontrollably in public. The type of sheer sadness that has no precedent. Affect. Pre-language. “Why are you crying?” “I don’t know, I don’t know”. Self-absorption; attention seeker. Feeling everything all the time. One big festering sore. Ugh, gross. Leaky emotions. Get over it.

Emotion is something that gets in the way. It is consuming; it distracts us from our purposes. Crying in public, a bar in Delhi or on the tube home in London, is an inappropriate performance of emotions. It is an act filled with misrecognition and shame.

How to recover from the emotion with no object. It’s untraceable, its a black smear on a page, a screwed up piece of paper. It’s to prepare for an event that has not yet happened. Better to find some temporary housing for all those tears like behind a bedroom door, or someone’s shoulder if you’re lucky.

And what shall we recover? What shall we choose to become? Because I see that realm of no recovery in the not so recessive space of my mind. It is dangerous and terrifying. Sometimes at the start of a yoga practice I imagine a big knotty ball of my unoriginal thoughts, fears and insecurities and hope in the close of practice for a dispersal of that emotion, shedding all that is not serving me to be left only with what is worth carrying. A continual attempt to perform that stuckness and untangle the whole knot. Like writing. To write is to think no longer about it.

I’d quite happily jettison my thoughts for a while. Being an instrument sometimes looks like happiness. At the close of the yoga practice I don’t know what I have lost and gained, I lose myself somewhere after Janu Sirsasana and find that glorious messy place where time and space blurs. The bodily sensitivity is the only guide.

Perhaps we should start seeing those emotions not as disturbances but as a radical act that refreshs our purposes anew. I don’t know, but if it were me reading the signs.

But it doesn’t matter, I’m on my own side now.