I Don’t Know What to Do
One of the funniest moments in any living things life is when it stands still. That moment of pure confusion over what to do next. It’s not boredom. It’s not tiredness. It’s unplanned, and always unexpected. For me it usually happens in the living room. I’m walking from the kitchen, take a right into the living room, and before I can make another turn to my final destination I stop, and momentarily forget everything about who I am, where I am going, what I am supposed to be doing, or what to do next.
Granted these moments only last for about 5 seconds, but they are glorious moments. Sometimes you have an observer. My wife or daughter are the best watchers. Makes sense, they are the only other people living in my house. “Did you forget how to breathe,” my wife will ask. Even my response is slow. The moment has to pass before I can answer. After all, if I forgot what it means to be a human, how could I possibly know what english is or how to communicate it effectively?
Sometimes you get to watch someone, or something have this paralyzation. My favorite is the cats. They seem to have this problem a lot. They also will walk into the living room, then stop in the middle of the room and stare at nothing for a few moments. Even when you call them, or slap the couch in a lame attempt to convey that they should join you on a plush lap, they don’t move. Their eyes go blank, and I like to imagine they are a human that suddenly got transported into a cat’s body. And like a fun children’s movie, for a second they are stuck thinking, “what the hell is going on, who am I, where am I, what am I?”
It’s not just in our living room that this happens, although how cool would that be if we had some sort of mental bermuda triangle situation going on in there? And I say living things have this problem because I even see it in nature. Have you ever been outside and seen a tree be completely still? I know they don’t generally mozy about, but I’m talking about completely still. You have to look at the top of the tree. I once heard a friend explain to his child that in order to see how windy it is, look at the top of the tree, because that is where you can gauge the effect of the breeze. He was glad to educate his son, and I was happy to feel stupid knowing I lacked this basic knowledge. So when you see a tree in a field stand completely still, sometimes for that brief moment I like to think the tree is saying, “wait, what’s really going on here?”
When the moment ends, the leaves slowly start bristling, the cat usually just plops down where it was with a thud, and I usually just shake my head and move on to the next room. I don’t give too much thought to the fact that for five seconds I forgot that I am a person. Those glorious moments of suspension are pretty awesome when you think about it. We are so driven to be the things we are. A person has to eat and work, a tree has to tree, and a house cat has a pretty tough life, so who can fault them for needing a second?
So when you see someone temporarily forget how to walk, or stare at a blank wall with Einstein-like concentration, know they are in temporary bliss. In those precious moments they aren’t worried about politics, homework, hair loss, family disagreements, or whether their outfit matches. They don’t even know what those things are. They are living at an elemental state of simply being. A good place to be if you can get there.
