The Jolt

back from away

Do you know that feeling of being so immersed in something you are doing, so visually and mentally locked in on it, that when you pause and look up you feel as if you’ve been quite suddenly ripped from one world into another? It is always a bit jarring, because this immersion process is slow and we don’t notice it happening. It happens to me nearly everyday when I look up from painting, but it still comes as a shock, a jolt. This is the world I’ve been in? Because we’ve temporarily squeezed ourselves into a narrower one and become so used to the decor that it begins to feel like the only one, so lost and enclosed are we in the detail of a painting or a good book or really anything. Pleasant things feel snug around us, a cozy little universe. Unpleasant things have a similar effect but the feeling is awful. Get lost in the detail of an anxious worry and become the sole inhabitant of a chokingly small world. In those cases the jolt is a relief— like waking up from a bad dream. This is the world I’ve been in? I had thought it was a much darker one.

Peace Beneath the Shadow, mixed-media collage, photographed in various light

We have such a knack for being absorbed into things. Without the inevitable jolt, the snap into wider awareness, we would be incredibly likely to find ourselves locked up tight inside small worlds. Only I guess we wouldn’t find ourselves there, because we wouldn’t know we were there. We would forget how we got there and that there ever existed another place. So thank goodness for the jolt.

Thinking about this tendency towards absorption, I have realized that it also seems to be true in a broader sense. These relatively short moments of fixation take place inside of wider fixations. The things we habitually think about and the ways we think about them. This is sort of like our mental context, the landscape upon which our thoughts grow like trees. It is a landscape that is also quite easily influenced by the physical world around us. Take, for instance, the weather or energy of the city we live in, the environment of our homes and schools, the types of books we read or news we watch. These things all contribute to a broader sort of absorption, they give an impression of a world and when we inhabit that world we feel it must be the only world we could inhabit. Then comes the jolt. We butt up against the boundary line, the wall painted with clouds in The Truman Show, we see the outline of a door. These jolts are more rare, and sometimes so shocking that we would rather ignore them, turn the boat around and sail back. But they are also exciting. Uncomfortable. Interesting. Wonderful.

I am thinking about how to manufacture this kind of jolt, so that every so often I can take myself by the shoulders, shake myself awake, and look around with fresh eyes at a fresh landscape.

Peace Beneath the Shadow, continued

To be honest, I’m not a very adventurous person. I love my little life in my little house and when I go away from it for too long I miss it terribly. So when I talk about this larger jolt I’m not really talking about backpacking up a mountain or going to Egypt, though I’m sure those things would do the trick. A more approachable version of the thing though is to simply change the way we live for a time. Not going on the internet for two weeks (as I am writing this it has been two weeks) has been a jolt for me. I am laughing because I remember having written in my last post that I would not come back online and claim to be more enlightened, and what I am writing now sounds very much like a declaration of enlightenment, but stick with me. It’s not that there is something magic about staying offline that has jolted me awake. Rather, it is having made the choice to significantly change my habitual way of living that has done so. I have felt much the same effects from other self-prescribed challenges, like a month of not buying anything or not eating sugar etc. I think that, more often, these jolts come from outside sources, like meeting someone new, getting in an accident or having a near-miss, reading a mind-blowing novel, being in a new country or a strange place in a familiar town. But I also think it is necessary that sometimes they come from within— A choice to do something new, to learn something difficult, or to do without some comfort upon which we have become dependent.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts <3 Until next time,