Wisps of Smoke

“Everything teaches a lesson.” I was feeling disappointed and anxious in the days following an ill-advised wrestling match and concussion. It was the end of a summer spent working at a boy’s camp, and my plans to lead a culminating backpacking trip were now in doubt. My head buzzed with headache if I tried to read, listen to music, or raise my voice. “Everything teaches a lesson.” These were my friend Nemo’s words of consolation. I don’t want lessons — I want to be healthy, to go on this trip, to be able to do everything I enjoy, I thought through tears. His consolation was spotless in its truth and logic, yet, in the moment, unable to console me at all.

I’ve now learned that the average concussion heals in two weeks; my concussion experience was not an average one. There are various reasons for this — whiplash, hypochondria, poor management. But what matters is that, over the next three months, instead of recovering, my condition declined. The list of stimulus I couldn’t handle slowly increased; over three months, I shed off layer after layer of what I could do, and, in a way, who I was.

In the first weeks I was upset at not being able to surf, party with my friends, start work on a thesis. I was pained and angry over what I had lost, the “full life” I wasn’t able to lead, anxious about when I would be able to recover. Four weeks in, after a brief foray into a crowded public space, I was left reeling. Holy shit I stepped outside, I have not felt this bad before. All I could do was sit down at a bench and put my head between my elbows, shielding my eyes from the sun. Musically saturated public spaces and restaurants became strictly off limits. Now I wished I could just read, watch TV, look at my computer — anything to fill time. I was used to walking with a podcast, sitting down with my computer, eating with a TV show. Being forced to just be, without stimulation, was grating.

I continued to decline, and a month later an intense conversation or a look out of the car window left my head spinning. I spent more and more of my time simply sitting. I swore that I would be satisfied if I could just go for a walk, or listen to a podcast without fear of worsening my condition.

Dark possibilities forked before my eyes. What if I can’t return to my normal life for a year? What if I am permanently damaged? What if I can never surf or play basketball again? The scene of the injury too appeared before me, and I seethed at myself: had I made a few different decisions that day, all this could have been avoided.

I retreated into spending my days sitting or lying in a dark room. I looked around; the fridge cycled on and off; thoughts rolled through my mind. Life slowed down — each meal, even each need to use the bathroom, became a joyful opportunity, a source of interest in slow blank space. My life became monastic. Get up. Stretch. Make tea. Have breakfast. Sit. Have a mid-morning snack. Sit in a different location. Pet the dog. Stretch. Eat lunch…. I spent an hour smelling various household objects to pass the time. After eating a citrus, I diverted myself by slowly tearing its skin into smaller and smaller chunks. What I was missing became less of a focus; my attention directed itself onto what I could have: each sensory input that helped me make it through my days.

Fears over my long term health put my small stresses over missing school or losing touch with friends into perspective. Against the weight of the fragility of life, I released my now small attachment the semester I had been hoping to have. This initial release opened me up to relinquish large attachments to certain futures or ideal lives, and so ease the futile tortures of anger and anxiety. Maybe I will be out of it for a year — I’ll figure it out, it’ll be alright. I can always find new activities I enjoy, at least I got to surf for the time I did. Maybe I am permanently injured — no use being angry about it. Any narrative of what life is, the way life is supposed to be, was violently exposed as just that — a narrative. The fictional blanket of control was thrown off. 

All the “essential” qualities of who I was: a reader and writer, an extravert, athletic, desirable, on a smooth upward life path were suddenly gone. These, it now seemed, were just ideas about who I was. Posed against the fragility of existence and irrelevance of anything outside my immediate surroundings, my identity dissolved into wisps of smoke.

It was like an experience of death, yet after all I thought I was had gone, I was left alive. And this view of the abyss did not inspire terror, but tranquility. I was overcome with a deep sense of existential calm and thankfulness; whatever happened, it would somehow all be alright in the end. And from this humbled position, I looked outwards towards habitual life with a bemused smile. The game of our constant ego performances was revealed as such, a game of armoring, distinguishing, denigrating, and posturing. One hit, one car crash or bacteria, and everything my ego thought was critical could be gone. So why am I so caught up in bullshit most of the time? And how can I so regularly treat others as if they’re not really there? If our perception of being alive oscillates between what I’ll call the habitual-egotistical and the existential-humble, this was a full swing to the second, more rarely inhabited end of the spectrum.

But this story — powerful experience, revolutionary new perspective, life continues with lessons learned — is a trope, and one that, for me, will no longer cut it. That’s because I’ve had this experience before. Not the concussion, but other experiences of intense de-habituation and realization, derived from powerful social experiences and psychedelic drugs. And the lessons of those experiences, as a real way of being and feeling, have stuck for weeks, maybe months. But habit is a patient and persistent foe. Ephemeral insecurities, restrictions on my expression of affection, micro-management of experience, constant judgements of others — they kept banging at the door until they invisibly became the normal way of life again. So at a certain point in the dark room I thought Fuck! I’ve learned all this stuff before, how have I stopped actually knowing it, and being it. I got captured again and I didn’t even realize it.

Sure enough, as I began to recover I also began to return to the habitual mode of perception, with its phone checking, not present presence, pleasure stacking, anxieties over control. Habit is not a pariah, nor a weakness, but it has a way of alienating us from the absolutely astounding fact that we are alive right now, of orienting our energies towards concerns quite trivial on the scale of existence, and separating us from ourselves, others, and experiences.

So I’ve spent a lot of my recovery thinking about how to retain perspective, remain de-habituated. Just “moving forward” would be disrespectful to the weight of the experience, when moving forward is so often tantamount to forgetting. The lessons might remain, but in a sterile memory form, in need of activation — not as a real way of being.

So how do I really know, feel, I am alive right now on a daily basis? (Aside, of course, from constantly taking acid or bashing my head again. I’ve ruled out those options. For now.) What I needed is a practice, one that constantly de-familiarizes, grounds, a constant perspectiving. I have settled on continuing the practice that at the most intense moments of my experience I came to know as obvious and essential: non-judgement.

The banal judgements we make on a daily basis are the currency of our ego games, the cosmetics of our mask. These judgements — who would wear that, how could they be friends with them, how are they so apathetic, why do they take everything so seriously — are rarely any sort of tool to impact positive social change. They are praise for the self, definition, disguised as righteous condemnation, and their social consequence is repulsion, not a helping hand. They are a sort of existential hubris, a denial that we were all thrown into this perplexing and often painful life thing, thrown into very different situations, and are all trying to make our way through it. They elevate the ephemeral to the essential and wash over the fundamental unity of our shared, fragile, existential predicament.

So active non-judgement is a way of silently saying hey, I see you, other existing presence, caught up in puffing and preening, or shitting on another to make yourself feel better, in truth insecure, lonely, weird, wanting to love and be loved. I see you, navigating this existence based on what you know, what is comfortable, finding meaning and keeping nihilism at bay as you can, maybe never having experienced anything beyond the habitual. I see you, it’s alright, I’ve been there, I too have been lost and confused, overly caught up in this ego dance, have done things in the past that I would judge now. And I will do it all again too. It’s ok, I see you other presence.

This acknowledgement, real acknowledgement, of the existential situation of the other is at the same time a reminder to the self. It is not only an I see you, but an I see me, an I see this moment for what it is. Smiling at a fellow surfer in the lineup praising Trump’s policies has not necessarily been easy or comfortable. Me thinking fuck him or cutting him off with a smirk, as much as I wanted to, would not have been righteous, or even politically pragmatic gestures. They would have been the mundane, the constant self-narrative of who I am, a certain narrative of what this reality is. Some friends have scoffed at the idea of withholding judgement in scenarios like these — even I have at times. It is a hard pitch; It doesn’t make sense within the logic of who we tend think we are, what we tend to think this reality is about. But that’s the point — it’s transcending comfort and habit, pushing to a layer of perception defined by acceptance, trust, humility, and forgiveness. So my pause, breath, and smile is that reminder, the even though my entire ego doesn’t want me to do this, your beliefs might not be your fault, and even though you might not realize it you are here right now, and I am here right now, and I hope the best for you on this journey of life, and trust that you can learn.

So as I enter back into the space of the mundane world, it is this practice that I hope will keep me tethered to just how crazy and amazing it is to be right now, and to be with others. Some slide into the world of the habitual is inevitable, and I won’t judge myself for that either. The mundane is part of this human life too. Games and performances are fun, important, poignant — but especially so when we are liberated from their weight, and these can become main imperatives.

So Nemo was right, of course. I did learn lessons by the end of the experience. But putting these lessons into words — everything is a gift, they are a human too, we are all going to die — produces platitudes as impotent as his original consolation. I need not blame these words for their inability to communicate their full content though, but allow them to be what they are: linguistic templates, or seeds. Seeds that can only crack open and curl upwards, to be actually known as true, with the soil and water of direct experience. So this piece has been my attempt to take the tree of the experience, pluck its fruit, its lessons, contained as verbal seeds once again, and scatter them out, right here.