To Feel Deeply

Such an amazing thing. Such a beautiful opportunity, really. I’m fascinated by how people move and talk and understand and behave and interact. I’m terribly ensconced by the wonders of nature: the waterfalls, the grass blowing in the wind, the wind itself, the ocean and its waves and tides and chops and swells, and its infinite life it houses.

I feel very deeply. These things that I so dearly appreciate about life—the little interactions, the diversity and interconnectivity of it all—I feel the way about them that I do so very deeply. Life and its things touch my heart and soul so deeply that I cannot be separate from them. If I am, I start to fade and fall into depressions and self-pity. Not because I hate myself or the world, but because I’ve been hiding from myself and hiding from the world, too; because not being connected to it all, the vast energy of everything, which is indeed my life force and drive, that leaves me like a leaf separated from its branch, slowly degrading and deforming and dying.

It’s true we need it all: the nature, the people. So very true. I feel the little moments between myself and others as intimately as I feel an ant crawling on my arm. I notice instantly and feel it linger long after contact has been broken. I feel my body getting lifted up and put gently down each time a swell passes underneath me while I’m in the ocean. I’m not sure why I’m as sensitive to everything as I am, but I am, and I’m learning every day how to love and appreciate that about myself. It’s not sensitive as in weak, but sensitive as in aware—so aware that sometimes I feel like I need to be a little ignorant so as not to be overwhelmed.

I miss things on purpose but also on accident sometimes. I get so mesmerized by something that I lose track of everything else. Sometimes that’s a person, or a wave, or a sound, or a page in a book, or a spot on the wall, or a bird in a tree. I find myself lost way, way more often than I find myself found. Maybe I’m a wanderer, an explorer at heart. Maybe settling is amazingly comfortable but so mundanely the same everyday that my soul yearns for new experiences as often as possible in this world, where we’re gifted with a short time period to do as much as we can of the things that light up our worlds.

I am guilty of being caught in some weird social media brain-washing that has made me afraid of being truly who I am and sharing that with the world, as if I wasn’t a kid for so many years being so unapologetically myself to every person, place, and living thing I came across. What society has deemed acceptable or normal had put me in an imaginary box that somehow I haven’t been able to unimagine for so many years. I feel like all of the hours I spend thinking, thinking about everything, has finally come to the point where I can realize that the box doesn’t exist; only me and my life do, me and my time do, me and my relationship with the real world and its inhabitants do.

I used to think for such a long time, believe even, that my thinking so much was a curse, a weight I was meant to bear for my short incubation here on planet Earth. It’s not. It’s a gift that I get to experience so many thoughts and words and interpretations of concepts and people and music and everything else. I couldn’t be happier to finally realize and find an outlet for my busy as busy can be brain. I want more and more to write and write and keep writing the things that pop up in my brain and share them not for the world to see and judge but for myself to make space for the ever more on their way. If I happen to think and then write about something that another person finds valuable or humorous or romantic or thoughtful or stupid, then that’s fantastic—all the more reason to keep going. Maybe one day after thinking and writing and writing and thinking I will have uncovered enough layers of thought to find something meaningful.

I wonder if I never began digging or only dug a little that I would never find that something that makes mine or anybody else’s heart skip or flitter or feel any of a million different ways. I think for a long time I had forgotten how meaningful it is to be able to make another person feel something, particularly something good, and especially something impactful—to possess a gift, if you will, to translate this magnificent experience of life into words that may or may not evoke feeling within another living person that could cause their experience of life to be enhanced in a positive way.

Maybe somebody who reads this or is reading this smiles at the words I’ve vigorously copied from my brain into this document and has a single moment of joy. That would be fantastic even if I never knew that I was responsible for that joyous moment. I think I will find great happiness in finding out that I had a part in making somebody feel good in any way. So for those of you who found my thoughts provoking or interesting or any number of other things and managed to give enough of your time and attention to my work, I thank you, for it means more to me than you will ever know that somebody appreciates something that I do for the love of doing it.