EMOTIONAL ROLLER COASTER
I have been back from Montevideo for three weeks and now I‘m off again. I feel as if my last flight just touched down on the runway and then lifted off again. But actually, in this three week visit to the United States I have had many more rich experiences than I had in Montevideo. I have been describing them here.
But I‘ve also experience feelings that have puzzled me. I don‘t know if these feelings are shared by other travelers or not. But even if they are entirely personal they have given me a rocky ride and they are related to something larger that I have long wondered about.
So feel free to disregard my rambling and skip to the next post if this seems nuts. This is the larger issue that I wonder about. What is it that stirs me to life and impels me through each day? I connect whatever motivates me with whatever motivates Maggie, my son Tom‘s dog who is coming to stay with me tomorrow. When Maggie comes in the door she will run in wild circles around the living room, leap up and bang against me and when I sit down she will begin to lick me. She apparently likes me. But she doesn‘t know that she likes me, she is not conscious of what she is doing, she is impelled into this frenzy by something inside her. When she meets certain dogs on a leash when we are out walking she will leap against her own leash as if attacking the other dog and bark in a frenzied way. She does that unconsciously as well. In fact she seems to go to sleep unconsciously, eat unconsciously, she is driven by something inside her to do everything she does.
And I seem, in an odd way, to do the same thing. I am conscious of my shifts in moods and am trying to understand them, but I seem to have little control over them. Some days I wake up from a nap and feel as if I am unable to do anything. The next day I will wake up from a nap and be raring to go. Some days writing these posts comes easily, some days and for days at a time, I am unable to write anything.
I don‘t will this, it just happens. The good thing is that even when I feel paralyzed after a nap and feel that it is impossible for me to do anything I can feel deep within me a twinge, the beginning of life stirring within me. And I know that if I wait awhile, for no reason that I can discern, I will slowly, slowly return to life and, finally, without knowing why, launch into writing or some other activity. I know that some people become paralyzed and can‘t get started again. They feel immobilized and as if life is not worth living. This must be what depression is and if it gets strong enough and lasts long enough it can be dangerous. But for me there is some kind of a life force, very similar to Maggie‘s life force, that gets me going again. All I have to do is wait patiently and I will turn almost manic. I guess this is what manic depression is.
But it is just the way that I seem to make my way along and it doesn‘t concern me that much. Life is a roller coaster ride. But I am writing about this at this particular time because right now I seem to be in two places at once. One part of me, the anticipating part is in Milan where I will meet Todd‘s cousins for lunch. They will just happen to be there. That anticipation stirs me and pulls me forward. But then I will take a nap and find that whatever it was that was driving me forward has disappeared and that I don‘t feel like doing anything at all, all motivation has disappeared. That doesn‘t worry me, because something within me, a phone call or a thought or nothing at all will start to bring me back to life again and I will start writing as I am doing now.
So this stop and go feeling seems to be stronger when I am in two places at once as I am now. But what I am really curious about is what this on again, off again, motivation is. Someone out there is probably doing an academic study of this pattern with electrical wires on a person’s scalp measuring electrical brain patterns. But I am not a scientist and wouldn‘t want to spend twenty years figuring this out. In my naïveté these are simply feelings, not brain waves, and they are built into my DNA. They were there in my ancestors long before they were human, when they are more like Maggie, and the function of these feelings was to impel them through life. And they are still there and are still the most important force that impels me to do anything, particularly those things that insure the survival of the species like eating, defending myself, procreating. I have the illusion that I am being rational, but what drives me are strong emotions and what brings me to a halt are the absence of these strong emotions. Or at least that is what it feels like to me and particularly this week when I am going through a transition from one way of functioning to another.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 