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I'm self conscious
It all just feels like too much.... You know... all of it.
Too much information. Too much stimulus. Too much needing. Too much feeling needed. Too much pain. Too much joy.
I just need it all to become less... More... manageable.
Like a bathtub.
Of all the places in the world, I think the bathtub might be the most perfect to me.
Think about it...
It's small, contained. The world ends in four very clearly defined firm and discernible porcelain directions. There's water: warm, hot, cool or cold.
What a miracle of modern plumbing!
When I'm contained within it, I can read, I can listen to music, or stories, or simply lay there and ponder in silence... Breathing... Feeling the water and the walls and the warmth.
Where I end and where the world begins, just doesn't feel quite so vast. The stimulus decreased, the pain and joy muted somehow.
Sometimes being fully honest, I'll let the water out and just lay there feeling the hard surface, supporting my body, reluctant to step out, where suddenly the world ends so much further away in each direction.
The room, the apartment, the building, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the country, the continent, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, the multiverse!
But the bathtub... I can feel exactly where it all stops.
What else feels like that? I guess... a train. Suddenly the world is merely a moving picture, speeding past as I sit, trundling along...
Or the backseat of a car. Cozied up in a small, soft space with nothing to do but read, listen, watch, rest...
Perhaps alcohol or other consciousness alterers— comforting food.
Shrinking down my world to the glass or plate in front of me: the bar's gleaming surface or table's comforting sheen.
Or candlelight. With its distinctive magical capability of "bath tubbing" any space one might be in. So long as the sun has set, suddenly any room becomes as small as the sphere of light's discreet illuminative power allows for.
Quite an advantage...!
But I suppose we do this in many different ways — making the limitlessness of it all more manageable, more bite-sized.
Such as subdividing up the great limitless expanse of Time into centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds.
It's not just to measure, but to parcel out.
" Just a bit at a time," we seem to be saying to ourselves.
Not forever. Just today. Just this evening. Just this next hour. We can't take it all in at once.... so we subdivide and subdivide. You don't climb a mountain in one step. Just one step at a time.
What's that rather famous carnivorous saying?
"How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
We have to, it seems, bend our creative force to the task of artificially limiting our experience of the grand "all of it" lest we explode in the face of the sheer intensity of the perception of a world so many millions of magnitudes grander than the tiny pin prick Perceiver taking it in.
So, as for myself, I return to the clearly delineated boundaries of the bathtub... and candlelight. Whenever possible. I can manage that.
" Managing." ....What a strange word to apply to dancing with the great magical mystery of this unfolding existential play.
There's a story I heard once about a disciple and an old master...
The disciple brought their cup to the master and poured the tea and into it until it reached the brim and said,
"This is how I feel: full up. Unable to take in anymore... yet I know I've only taken in such a very small amount! However am I to keep learning? My vessel categorically doesn't feel big enough to contain it all!"
And the master, smiling in that archetypally appropriately wise way, rose carefully taking the disciple's cup and, as the disciple followed, walked to the edge of the sea... and threw the cup into the ocean.
... Something like that.
It makes much more sense, it seems, to throw oneself into the immeasurable sea of existence, rather than trying to contain it all, manage it, within our own tiny little finite minds.
To stand beneath the great starry expanse of sky and to allow my consciousness to fall into it rather than trying to take it all in, as the expression goes.
But sometimes...
It's still really nice to light a candle, step into a bath, bury my head under the covers,
And pretend that's utterly all there is of the world.
I don't know...
What do you think?
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