Why Can't I Let Things Go?
A lyric essay on MYSELF FOR ONCE
Why can’t I let things go? Why can’t my mind relax? I’m driven to keep doing and keep going, past pain past discomfort past boredom to get something that I want.
What do I even want?
Achievement? Satisfaction? Do I want that inner knowledge that I can do, that I’m able? That I come from bacteria and worms and we scrabbled out of the ground, rude carbon constructs, into primates then Homo Sapiens Sapiens—and here I am, being, doing, creating, and driving myself nuts about it?
My therapist asked me why can’t I let things go, why can’t I relax, and I couldn’t answer her. I just sounded like this, talking in a circle and trying to make sense of it all. Maybe the understanding is in the talking. Maybe this is the answer here hidden in the camouflage behind these words.
Why do I chase ephemeral things, fleeting things, and when I get them that’s just the signal to hunt for more, and to never rest, and to not appreciate what there is but what there might be? It’s a fourth dimensional possibility like a carrot hanging in front of me.
Does it make me miserable? Sometimes. Does it give me meaning? Often.
What is meaning? It can’t be the pursuit of happiness because the quickest way to be happy would be to be born stupid, born lazy, born so easily satisfied, born with such a malformed sense of curiosity that they can barely get out of bed in the morning, someone who floats through life only consuming and never thinking. Mindlessly taking and never giving.
Then meaning is something else, yes? Not happiness, so what? Maybe it’s a different happiness, more of an achievement of destiny, of inexorably becoming what we were always going to become. We don’t do these things because we chase the kind of happiness that’s lightning in our mouths or magic against our fingertips. No, it’s in the spirit—it’s driven higher in the brain than sex or food or comfort. It’s self-actualization.
Sometimes I don’t believe in free will. How can you, when you add up the external factors, massive and never-ending, against the mere fragile will a single human can impose? It feels like we’re propelled forward by our lot in life, assuming agency inside the buffeting winds. We’re all just the culmination of billions of years of atoms slamming together—how can we kid ourselves that we’re in control?
That’s the predeterminism: the damned and saved will always become their destiny, and I’m this way as well: tireless and tired, hunting but never sated, because I know who I am. This.
An idea made flesh. A time crystal—a set of actions and reactions, spinning gently through time as its 4th dimension, humming a song through the universe, always in motion.
Remember, happiness is a complicated thing, and you can be happy when you’re not. You can hold different miseries and happinesses simultaneously. That’s what makes you a complicated being, and I certainly feel like I’m a complicated being.
Maybe it’s arrogance, and I take a perverse pride like a martyr in suffering for my work, like I’m just so great it’s all worth it, but we can skip the judgment call there. My own valence here doesn’t matter as much as you might think; it’s not going to change my actions. It’s just an interpretation, a mental blanket on the very hard reality. You can live in all the layers you want but it’s still buttressed by some immutable truth in the end.
I have to build something, even if it’s just a legacy. I can’t just sit still. Ok, legacy, now we’re getting somewhere. The obvious next step here—let’s jump to it—is the memento mori and the fear of death. When you sit still, your mind can wander, and you can wander into the land of the valley of death, so don’t stop. Be busy.
So maybe I’m absorbed in my work because I have to do it because the alternative is worse: to marinate in my own mortality, to waste the fleeting flicker of life we express before we’re snuffed out. Maybe I’ll just be a spasm of creation before I fall to the floor, but look at all the goodies I left behind.
And a billion years from now, even when everything will turn infrared and dissolve, and someone less enlightened might say that because of that, nothing anyone does matters much at all, those moments in time will always exist, backwards from our forwards, perfect snapshots built into the Planck time and Planck distance we only have an inkling about. It always happened, somewhen. How’s that for a real fucking legacy?
I know what you mean and I'm trying to learn to do that and feel my way through writing more because my brain is not wired that way, like at all. So Im learning
This was really thoughtful and philosophical. I resonate with the tension of wanting to stop but being unable to and not really knowing why.