The Other Side

I take a deep breath.
I close my eyes.
I stop thinking.

Everything is darkness. There's no sound, there's no smell, and there's no taste. I can feel nothing. My senses are shut down. This is a place where I can relax. This is a stopping point but it is also a starting point. This is where I can really think.

I have to stay in control. I can't let too many thoughts in at once. I have to pace myself and do this one thought at a time. Where do I go from here? Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes I let my mind loose to wander where it will.

They say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I think that I have read enough about this to know that this law is based very much on their definition of "thing." They, meaning the scientists, operate mostly in the physical world. This place where I am is not in the physical world. This is the space where my thoughts dwell. How fast does a thought travel? Where does it come from and where does it go to? They may have answers for this as far as the study of brainwaves and all that jazz, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I don't think that their place and my place are the same things. If I see myself sitting on a plain with nothing to see in all directions but the sky above and the grass below and then a moment later I am surrounded by stars, planets, and inky blackness, then what just happenned? Did I move? Did the places move? If I can discard them and then bring them back are they not real? I think that real and not real are relative. If it's real to me, then it doesn't really matter if it's real to anyone else.

This is my place. It can be whatever I wish it to be whenever I wish it to be. This is where I am when I read. This is where I am when I write. This place has no beginning and no end. It is neither empty nor full but it can be both. It is always a clean slate but also always a masterpiece. My job is to take the things here and move them to a piece of paper. It is not an easy thing to do. Sometimes this place seems like a million movies all chopped into little bits a few seconds long and then playing at random. It's hard to make sense. It takes a huge amount of effort to slow it down, keep things in order, and keep them under control. The irony is that to keep it interesting there cannot be too much control.

So there's the rub. I live in this world and my creative side lives in the other. Reading and writing are the only two things that I've found that can join the two halves. I used to think that this was just entertainment. Now I believe that this is the bridge between the part of me that I use every day and the part of me that I've been ignoring for way too long now. I think this is the part of me that I've been missing. It's the part of me that I need in order to do work that I believe in.

If it had been a snake it would have bit me.