Restless

And what is the sense of feeling unfocused. When my eyes are not focused I I cannot see clearly: everything is indistinct. I remember the Jimmy Cliff song, “I Can See Clearly Now.” He sings, “I can see clearly now the rain is gone/I can see all obstacles in my way Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind/It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiny day.” But when the soul cannot focus, then what? For the past several days or weeks I have not seen clearly nor can I see the obstacles in my way or even know the road I would travel on this bright, bright sunshiny day. I can’t see anything clearly. That particular state is not like that of the hallucinogenic experience when the hard boundaries that defined the shape of things evaporated and the things of the world flowed smooth and connected as in the colors of the light shows that moved behind the bands at the Fillmore East. But that is not my present experience.
            Now I walk about from room to room and cookie jar to cookie jar without a sense of purpose or patience to remain seated anywhere. I forget what I intended, or aware of that intention, find myself incapable of attending to it and pass easefully into distraction. I walk about seemingly in a stupor and often forget why I am in motion. I straighten everything in the house and wipe the counters clean. And I am not ill at ease but not quite comfortable.
             I suppose that one could describe the condition I am experiencing as depression. Perhaps. Certainly thinking about the state of the world and scanning the newspapers—too horrifying to actually read—could result in a depressive state. Wars. Assassinations. Ruthless dictatorships. Ruthless exercises of power. Truthless Trump. Floods and earthquakes. Craven Republicans. And that is usually the reports on page one! But, in fact, depression is not what I am experiencing right now which might be what a depressed person might say. Rather, I think that I am allowing myself to be lost, to be bored, and await the moment when something embraces an interest and I follow my inclination and set off in pursuit of something of which I do not yet know. Come Watson, the game’s afoot, I will shout, and turn dedicated to the tasks at hand. The important element here is to leave myself open not to inspiration but to experience. Then the work will begin.
             Perhaps I am in the moments just sauntering. Thoreau says that there is a great art to saunter. I would be an artist of the saunter. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau says “What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine wither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us though the actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.” And so though he inevitably walks in a westerly direction, though as he admits “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world,” it is lost Thoreau would be. So, I, too, am walking West . . . into the wild, which seems rather ironic as I sit here in front of the computer screen and watch through the window as the leaves begin to turn colors. But as I have learned also from Thoreau I should pile high the cans of canned meat if that is what I would have for my saunter. I am not restless though, of course, as usual somewhat anxious. I recognize which way I walk, but I am uncertain what I might find but certain that I will find that for which I look.