That's a ridiculous title, I know, but for whatever reason that song is playing in my mind, complete with the soulful hay-hows of the backup singers.
Everything always happens at once. That's a theme of this world. Everything is always happening. All the time. That's a big thing to think about. It becomes especially apparent in my little, relatively meaningless life when all of the things that I think are "big" at the moment start to pile up and culminate into one afternoon or morning or hour, and I get overwhelmed with the feeling that I'll never get to it all, that I'll never get it all done, that there's just not enough time in the day and just not enough power in my brain and just not enough motivation in my gut and I'm screaming at the people who can't drive and I want to start fights with random strangers who haven't even looked at me funny and all of the little world that I've built for myself seems to be crashing in on itself and I just don't think I'll ever be able to lift it and then...
Stop.
That's when I take a little time out. And that's where I am now. I'm taking a time out. I'm sitting and writing and thinking, but not about the same things I was thinking about before; I'm thinking about this. Right now. Right in front of me. And that's a good thing to think about.
I just finished reading To the Lighthouse again, and I liked it even more than before. It's one of those books that rolls along like a snowball, picking up new meanings and adding them to its mass with each read-through. The thing that particularly jumped out to me during the class discussion last night was the use of perspective to show that "bigness" and "littleness" and meaningfulness and triviality are all relative. The first section takes up over 120 pages, yet very little happens. Mrs. Ramsay makes a dinner and James doesn't get to go to the lighthouse. That's pretty much it. The second section takes up 20 pages and everything happens. Death, destruction, chaos. Ten years in twenty pages. The trick to it all is that the first section is told from within the minds of characters who assign great meaning to events that, when paired with the events of the second section, seem incredibly menial. But to the characters, these events aren't menial at all, they're life. That's what we get. All we've got is our one little perspective and sometimes, sure, it's good to try and step back and see the bigger picture, but that's not really what we're made for. We naturally get tunnel vision and focus on making dinner, or taking a trip, or writing a paper, or making a presentation, or any of the other trillion little things that we do in a given lifetime.
So, when I got overwhelmed today with all of these things that are so close in front of me that they looked like goddam planets hurtling towards my precious little atmosphere, I stopped and took a shower and wrote this entry to bring myself back down to earth. Because the next thing you know, ten years will be passing in twenty pages.
