Tag Archives: monkey bars

My World Never Feels Safe…And Now I’m Right

The roads are all lined with eggshells. Tiptoes and feather steps, thinking back to a time when sidewalk cracks were the only items on a list of things to avoid.

Leaving a house full of physical walls to venture outside into a world of imaginary ones is a nasty little mind trick to navigate.

For many years I have maintained some semblance of sanity by following a specific series of patterns, habits, and concocted restrictive rules to live among the “normals,” and do my best to blend. Now, everyone else has systems, and there’s just too much competing static to cut clean s-curves without a face full of powder.

Monkey bar-swinging from one brain surgery to the next has saddled this lanky lad with a backpack full of trauma, and it’s a daily challenge to keep those shoulders back. But when that carefully calibrated balance is disrupted, and uncontrollable variables are added to the recipe, the already-crispy cookies in the oven tend to emerge blackened and burned.

If the personal side effects of this historic snapshot are nothing more than increased worry, discomfort, and agitation, I will consider myself incredibly lucky. Countless victims of this global tidal wave would gladly trade everything for a little increased anxiety.

Nervousness is temporary. Asphyxiation is not.

This is Chapter One. We are wading into dangerous waters, and we’re not even waist-deep. Stay vigilant. Stay clean. Stay supported.

Stay safe.

Adolescence Interrupted

Isolated Incidents

isolated1

“To thine own self be true.” -William Shakespeare

Framing an existence through the filter of personal perception is a simple task for an introvert. We walk through the world as observers, internally commenting on the people and events that paint the landscape of our journeys. At times, we question the motivations of the masses and shake our heads at the absurdity of society’s accepted rituals, wondering how we could be so far from average.

This self-imposed exile can both comfort and corrode, but the impetus to peel away the security blanket is often the needle in a hay silo. Our feet aren’t shaped to walk on the same path as yours, so we, quite literally, are late to arrive at the party.

My only respite from the streaming onslaught of thoughts, analyses, and a babbling internal dialogue is the studied focus on a bouncing yellow tennis ball or the two-hour “braincation” achieved by sitting in a theater, staring at a screen or stage depicting someone else’s adventures.

Like everything else, the chasm between chatty party guy and weirdo on the wall has widened with age. I have a hard time remembering the high fives and toothy grins, the eagerness to meet someone new, or the desire to play any role other than whatever feels authentic in the moment. I’m far too occupied swinging on the monkey bars of my own intellectual jungle gym to take a break and explore the rest of the playground.

Maybe this changes. Maybe not. I have lived a life of streaks and patterns, so I never rule out the possibility of 180s. But being a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by friends and familiarity, is a bizarre phenomenon.

Adolescence Interrupted

Coincidentally Cool

coolCoincidence is “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident, but seem to have some connection.” But, how much of what we believe is accidental is simply an energetic or universal pull toward a specific outcome? Can we manifest results through the catalyst of our subconscious and its ability to focus so throughly on some predetermined consequence that we are fooled into believing we are the orchestrators of our own fate?

There are strong arguments on both sides of the debate because what we deem to be coincidental can be so unfathomably absurd that we’re left searching for explanations to justify the illogicality of anything that appears to dance in the space between hard-nosed facts and dreamlike fantasy.

Mystics will look to the Earth’s more magical properties, just as religious zealots  will point to their blind devotion and faith-driven divinity as justifications for anything that sits outside of conventional knowledge.

But, what if we all harnessed the ability to construct our destinies? What if, somewhere in the untapped territories of our brain, existed the tools necessary to write our own blueprints, and build individualized templates? Could we avoid a life of pitfalls, blunders, and misunderstandings?

Irony is a powerful concept and the bevy of impossibilities that consistently defy probability is part of what makes life worth exploring. If walking in the sand was only about following footprints, we’d likely feel the void of uncertainties and a desperate lack of adventure.

Until we resolve the dispute of whether or not we are merely mice on a maze, running tirelessly toward preordained cheese, let’s marvel in the coincidental nature of the human playground. Maybe we are assembled with safeguards to protect ourselves from excessive rates of evolution. Maybe we’re not meant to know anything more than how many monkey bar swings we have left in our limbs…at least for now.