Suspended

I haven't "blogged" for some time. I could claim I haven't had the time. I could claim that when you're progressing in life, when you're performing the important tasks that will make you a better person, you may not want to spend some of your energy in "blogging".

I could claim I am so immersed in the action of acting that I have not the time and/or the patience for theories, much less the theory of action.

I would be lying.

I could claim I don't know what to say.

I would be lying.

The truth is I feel like I'm dreaming the kind of dream where you find yourself in the middle of a task that you don't know how to do and you just can't remember how you've come to be in than position.

An exam you haven't studied for?

A performance you haven't practiced for?

A song you haven't learnt the lyrics for?

In this case, I feel like I'm expected to fly a plane. I'm just holding on to the yoke, trying to make sense of all the buttons and switches in front of me, the ground already -incomprehensibly- many thousands of feet below me. All the while, the same questions flash through my mind again and again, unanswered and unanswerable: "Why am I doing this?" "When did  I agree to do this?" "How did I get in the air in the first place?" "How will I manage to learn how to fly on my first flight?"

I'm wearing my headset, but there's nobody on the other end. The co-pilot's seat next to me is as empty as the sky around me. I will crash, I know that. I don't have any idea what I'm doing and you don't just wake up (or fall asleep) one day and just find out how to fly a plane. This is as lost a cause as one can be. 

For the moment, my course is steady, though. I'm flying straight and level, so I don't dare change a thing, move a thing other than my eyes. The landscape is really very beautiful. It's a pity it won't be too long before I'll have to desecrate it with the burning and smoking remains of the vessel around me.

Sure enough, for some reason my plane abruptly starts losing altitude. Fear grips my insides and I'm choking on an imaginary lump on my throat. Despite having no idea what I'm doing, I just can't help fumbling with the instruments in my cabin. Maybe there is a tiny part of me that thinks I might find a way to make it. It's amazing how, when reasoning and knowledge is over, faith takes over immediately. Indiscriminate faith in luck, chance, intuition, whatever. The resilience of false hope is startling, although boringly predictable on evolutionary basis.

The song echoes in my mind and it hits home.

"We tremble and spin

suspended within"

So much truth in so few words...