Headrush

When I was little, as most of us did, I used to hang my head upside-down off the side of my couch and pretend that the ceiling was actually my new floor and that I was now living in this upside-down land where light-fixtures were now things that I had to step over and furniture now dangled precariously from the ceiling.

That was good shit.

I didn't even actually DO anything. I would just hang there for hours, head as red as a bright red lego, cloudy with the heartbeat of all the blood accumulating there, IMAGINING my existence in this newly-flipped universe, imagining the clutter-free simplicity of my new floors and walkways, just SEEING things in this new and different way and making it my new reality, for a short time at least.

This gets harder to do as you get older, I think. I still try to. But it doesn't come with ease anymore--too many distractions, not enough imagination. Feelings of being trapped, being stuck in the mundane, trudging onwards as days whisk so quickly past. I mean, who EVER felt these things when they were little? Nobody. You had superheroes and smurfs and coloring books with which to distract yourself. Nothing was impossible.

It still isn't. And yet we've so fiercely convinced ourselves that it is.

When I was little, I also always wanted that ONE really sweet, really garbagey ice cream cone from the ice cream truck--the one with the gumball at the very bottom, a sweet and eternally-lasting surprise after all the energy it took to work your way through the sticky goo of spun sugar. All because of that stupid gumball. That stupid magical thing.

Everybody always yammers about how people get wiser with age. But we were some damn smart philosophers when we were younger--and that's probably why we were so blissfully and obliviously happy, for the most part. We were brilliant philosophers who lived by our philosophies instead of just paying them lip-service, all without even realizing we were in the grasp of such brilliance in the first place.

And yet here we are now as adults, bemoaning our confusion, crying about our sad fates, struggling to make meaning out of madness.

Whenever I get stressed, I try to remind myself of these things that I once understood so inherently, so clearly, these things that were such an unquestionable part of my daily life that they never even passed through my brain as abstractions/cliches/oversimplifications because they were simply the way things were. I remind myself of them again, like a mantra, as I write this: Nothing is impossible. Be happy with small things.

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