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It’s winding down, against my will. Ending. The last wisps of a flute swirl around; I had danced upon those, into a landscape stretched out before me. A harp’s final notes caress me gently, melancholically, before drifting off one by one, usurped less and less noticeably by the ether. Then all is silence, and I open my eyes.
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I should probably clean my room. The space I live in is way full.
Technically, the space I live in is empty except for me, as space can only be used so long as it’s not already in use. Much of my room is now filled, with useful elements—where I can no longer exist. I try to live and breathe in-between it all. I know the room as it once was must still be somewhere nearby, but a picture of a much more packed room has been superimposed onto it. And the one thing lacking in this picture is emptiness; breathing room.
My chamber used to be huge. I still remember entering it excitedly for the first time, not long before moving. The description ‘spacious’ would not have been ill-suited, especially compared to the bedroom I was moving from. Over the last five years I have used this room well, more and more. Correspondingly I possessed less and less room. A single swivel on one of the two desk chairs beside my bed reveals how viciously much there is and there is to do. A myriad of items are planted to engage me, for instance whence I am bored. Books, juggling balls, video games, a boxing bag, books, utensils for writing and drawing, games, chewing gum… and a thousand more books. Actually, no; without hyperbole there are… one… two… three… four… [ ] …830 books in my room. Most of these items are at rest, beneath a thin layer of dead skin cells. There is also a nigh-infinity of ideas to ideate, captured in multiform. Some are located on a whiteboard or on its preceding paper curtains. Others are saved like treasures in notebooks that have been lost to time. Some ideas reside in one of the many bountiful piles of paper, here and there and who knows where, and a few hundred thoughts have been jotted down on coloured sticky notes which are visible everywhere, at constant risk of falling down as if they were leaves in autumn. Additionally, I have a ‘to-do’ pile, consisting of items I recently received that I meant to temporarily put aside into one stack, to work through ‘soon’. (I, in fact, have multiple such piles, because if one remains untouched for long enough it fades from my consciousness and becomes a part of the décor, like a stalagmite; after which I find another spot for the things that keep on entering my life, and I create there a fresh stack which I intend to ‘work through first’, before I’ll feel ready to dismantle the stalagmite formed prior to it). Then there is a naturally-formed, curved pathway that cleaves the area between my walls; it is clear floorspace, carved out by movement taking the easiest course through, over time, like the slow but consistent trickle that carved the trenches of the Grand Canyon. The sceneries surrounding and surrounded by my man canyon (my room isn’t much of a ‘man cave’) are less natural. They are certainly less dynamic these days. There used to be a healthy outflow of ‘stuff’ that approximately kept up with that influx, but this tide has stagnated. There is a growing heap of plastic bottles at the end of the creek. There is dust underneath them as well as in most, if not all, corners around. More and more and more of my environment is being deemed ‘clean-worthy’ by whatever deities are residing and judging from above; I have received impossibly-meaningful cleaning notices in dreams and have seen otherworldly visions of angels carrying dustpans into war. (I have, on a related note, wondered how I might upgrade my freemium account for the divine channel to one that doesn’t get advertisements so frequently). And then there is The Portal, connecting my room to the spirit of humanity and her collective tour de force—a significant portion of all things thought and/or done—even and ever more nigh-infinite in scope. It generally insulates me from boredom, yet still I sometimes dread the ceremony that opens it and summons my consciousness to its great domain. I haven’t always the energy needed to escape from this place. I especially haven’t always the energy to bring order to its inherent chaos. Even without counting I am certain I have over twenty hundred unread emails spread over my two inboxes. The sheer number of tabs I have opened and bookmarks I froze into suspended reality paralyzes me when I contemplate it. There are dozens of thousands of items—things—inhabiting the digital recesses and virtual alcoves of my computer and my online life. I don’t often whirl around on my chairs, as when I do it feels like the dam that was protecting me from the swelling lake breaks, and I get swept away by a cascade that overpowers me.
Suffice to say: there are things in my room. Malevolent though this ‘stuff’ may not be, and even if not half the cubic meters around myself are filled, sometimes it feels like I am trapped, and suffocating. This is an undesirable way of living for me, as I don’t have a fetish for being choked. But I found a craft that allows me to navigate the whirlpools and waterfalls of my headspace. It started with knowledge.
Firstly, I knew that space could not be destroyed, only filled or emptied. I knew the resulting states of fulness or emptiness logically had to alternate, and that the possibility of this was influenced by the state of adjoining spaces. Secondly, I came to know that the inside of my mind mirrored the inside of my room, and that the inside of my room mirrored the inside of my mind. With these spaces also adjoined as such, making room in one of them would also affect the other.
This knowledge alone was not enough though; if I intended to do some cleaning but my mind grew overwhelmed with the ‘manyness’ of things around, my space began to feel even smaller. The act of ‘cleaning’ transformed into an obstacle insurmountable. It became hard to imagine anything but the clutter that had embedded itself, here. My computer and the internet had been an escape for a while, but ‘fullness’ had seeped into them, too. I devised another defense mechanism against the feeling of overwhelm. For instance when a state of ennui did befall me, and I looked around for ‘something to do’, and I knew making a decision to engage with whatever individual plaything would weigh heavy on me as I would effectively say ‘no’ to all else, I responded on auto-pilot, saving me from mental anguish—I would look at a thing, get ‘pre-bored’, and think ‘no, not today’. (Which then also usually happened when deliberating the operation of cleaning.) To avoid arduously saying ‘no’ to so many individual possibilities, I said ‘no’ to everything at once. Which, correspondingly, meant there was nothing left. There was nowhere else to run.
Wherever I went, I would always eventually come back to my room. I was forced to acknowledge that if I really wanted breathing room, I unavoidably would have to make it myself. Deliberation and delineation, though natural to me, had not gotten me further; so I stopped. I looked at the first thing I could do and just did it. And it helped.
Without thinking once or second guessing, I rearranged my desk. I shelved my infrequently used dictionary, cleared away my half-emptied nasal spray, and returned those squeeze-things to train your grip strength. I threw away the months-old earphone box and arranged my notebooks and pens. Etcetera. And so I learned that I had—that I’d always had—a hand in my space.
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Through more experimentation, little by little, I came to understand some methods I prefer for space-making. Nowadays when I feel stuck, I may open my window. This becomes a portal of a different sort, through which my space, which had felt so crowded, merges with the space beyond my residence. I hear birds chirping and leaves rustling outside (also alternatingly;) the breeze brushes my skin. It then seems like I am in a much larger space that is relatively far emptier. It feels fresh; thus follows my thinking.
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Or I request of my phone and earphones to duet a relaxing song. I like flutes and harps and other instruments that are easy on the ears. While the music plays I close my eyes, opening my mind. I may breathe or move around, as if transported to a world where the sun rises and sets as far as the eye can see, where no objects cover up the sharp, clean edges of the horizon.
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Or I go for a ride on my bike, not to go somewhere but to be going somewhere; destinationless. Free. Even whence I traverse paths I have before and my curiosity has faded, the sensation of enormous openness remains. There are no walls to claustrophobically lock me into my own suspended, asphyxiating reality; there is just the sky above.
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When the tension around and within me eases at times like these, I have gained room to breathe. I then still return to a full room, but it’s not as paralyzingly clogged as it had been. I know and feel that doing something small helps; I can make space, even if at first swivel it feels stupendously challenging, or if an expansive mindscape seems out of reach.
Before, when the dam broke, it had felt like I was trying to hold back a thundering waterfall, holding only a cup. Now, after opening a window, listening to music, or going for a ride—making space mentally—I look at my hands and see a bucket. And I look up, at the waterfall, and see that it’s actually more of a trickle.
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