Lately, the sponge of my being has been submerged in matters so great in volume that I hardly remember how to speak. I do, of course, remember how to speak which is unfortunate, sometimes, and gets me into trouble, often. It’s possible that you’re reading this, knowingly, recalling a time that you yourself were a victim of my tongue. But really, isn’t that the cold core of what relationships are? A rally of perpetrator and peace-maker in the game of sour speech? Maybe yes, maybe I’m deflecting.
Anyway, the sponge.
The thing about sponges is that when they’re saturated, they can’t consume any more. It doesn’t matter how long you immerse them, once they’re full, they’re full. At the moment, the banks of my brain are pulsating with similar, screaming sentiments of “please, no more”; the storage is low, the carriage is overcrowded, there’s no room at the inn. My squidgy mind sits heavy at the top of my head, applying a pressure that causes my eyes to droop more deeply each day. Call it saturation! Call it ageing! Call it productivity! Call it reality! Whatever you call it, it’s unattractive — and it’s inevitable.
My teenage years were steeped in chaos: illness led to a morbid diagnosis, diagnosis led to intense treatment, treatment led to thankful remission and that remission kickstarted a period of adolescent angst-on-steroids as I pushed the barriers of my new-found ‘invincibility’. It was as frantic as it reads and marked the beginning of a common theme over my life – each year has, in one way or another, had an air of mayhem about it. Some of this has been down to myself, some down to circumstances and some down to the people I’ve let into my life. This mania doesn’t lend itself solely to the worse, though – there’s definitely a corner of chaos that I adore and thrive in. To the steady, that sentence will ring alarm bells but to the turbulent, it will ring of home.
Which one are you hearing?
I have a theory that those who become saturated are those that aren’t satisfied until they see something for themselves. It takes a certain level of challenge, anger, stupidity or empathy to allow such subjects to meaningfully hold space in your mind. To most, this process looks like pointless wrestling but to a few, it provides a reason to live. I often harbour pangs of jealousy for those that can hover just above the deep waters of disorder. I wonder how they manage to skim its waves, appearing just compassionate enough to maintain relationships but removed enough to avoid any ounce of personal disruption. Truly, this way of living astounds me because, although some of its at-arm’s-length aspects resonate, I can’t imagine a week without the agony of questioning. And it is, wholehearted agony, to swim in the seas of not knowing, or knowing half but not whole, or knowing whole but not having the means to resolve. Whether it’s a meta concept that sits on the throne of the unknown, something trivial affecting others, or a blank in your journey to understanding who you are, I’m sure that it’s these open-ended queries that keeps me consistently waterlogged.
Every day, countless adverts serve me with solutions to my saturation; meditation apps, holiday deals, motivational quotes, numbing medication and spa treatments. In all of their offerings, though – as shiny as they initially may seem – lies a presentation of cures that are all ways to empty my mind; to switch off, to mute my thoughts, to grow desensitised. The problem is, I love my mind. I love it’s aching, frustrating, life-saving, tendency to fight. I love its silent scream at injustice, the feel of its furrowed brow at a dilemma and its piercing exhilaration at the receipt of good news. It has its mania-tinged drawbacks, obviously, and I do hope that as I learn, grow and age that the peaks and troughs of feeling soften, but I’ve come to realise that I’d rather live complicatedly saturated than coast through my days with an oblivious, self-focused or unoccupied mind.
I’m writing provocatively, sure, and there are notations of pause and peace that should rightfully take their place in the scores of our days and weeks. But to me, looking to consistently empty our minds is like agreeing to undergo an emotional anaesthetic that keeps us operating subconsciously until who we are and how we uniquely think is subdued. Surely, learning how to interpret and order the noise that so closely accompanies us will lead to a more secure serenity than drowning it out altogether.
The sponge of your being may, too, be submerged in matters so great in volume that you hardly remember how to speak. You may be sitting heavy in the theoretical trenches of saturation and find yourself pining for the promises of an empty mind. But, however tempting the lure of passivity becomes, accepting that the adventure of firstly, embracing our minds and secondly, comprehending all that we perceive is important remains one of the greatest opportunities that we have to challenge what we’re told, make room for difference and pitch an alternative ending to the story.
Without that, there would be little reason to get out of bed at all.