Backtracking While Spacewalking

Morning Thoughts #194

Childhood, where is your illumination? What hopes, but was it about hope at all? So full of itself, what we now interpret as hope or possibility— is it just the retrospectively escaping air of that fullness? Moments like balloons blown to their absolute limit, always a single abstract breath away from popping, and yet there was never even the slightest risk of that happening.

Above all, it’s hard to assess accurately. The sensitivity, the neuroticism, appeared young. So too did happy moments that were never considered in full; they were simply lived. Oh, I feel most native in the act of innocent creation and most uncentered in stages of savage overcorrection. Oh, lagging development and the not-entirely-organic growth spurts they spurred.

An early adulthood too obsessed with the push, push, push to loosen a (seemingly) stalled state. Not feeling the effect right away, in the end, too much force was applied, and not only was I loosened, but I flew—far past the goal, out of cultural orbit, as it were. And now I’ve entered what may very well be the decisive phase: the correction to the overcorrection, which itself was understandable but excessive. How to describe this decisive phase? A phase of weightless backtracking, the pursuit to recenter in a land of near-zero gravity.

And as much as I might wish it to be so, I don’t think I’m alone in this. I flew past the goal of a simple, happy life—tradition and ancestral wisdom in the right lanes, only to be passed. And now, applying the brakes isn’t enough; I have to learn to backtrack, not fearing the origin that set me on edge.

Having begun, but still being only halfway back, I consider the fuel that led me astray. And I’m left with this: a sensitivity that meant an overconsumption of the world—cultural dinner plates further afield from my given home and its time-honored lessons. Embedded within corporate media and corporate entertainment are the sick fables of our time, and they comprised far too much of my diet, tempting (but usually indirectly so) away from my upbringing and toward a path of sterile novelty.

Being impressionable—too impressionable—that is one of the chief dangers to the sensitive soul with an underdeveloped critical faculty (which is often to say, a young sensitive soul!). Everything makes an impression on such a person; many more lessons are being consumed than there are teachers certified to give them. Even before the smartphone, to be sensitive was to be overstimulated by the world at large.

Oh, sensitive friends, despairing of absurd modernity, it’s not nostalgia you feel. And it’s not quite grief at irrevocable loss either. It’s a far more preferable situation, actually! For you see, we’ve overshot what can be returned to, so long as we don’t mind doing so with an awkward gait. Yes, the era of necessary backtracking has begun, and we’ll look more than a little like spacewalkers as we do so. Why? Well, because we may have accidentally achieved escape velocity before realizing we really need to turn ourselves around…