The Grip on the Carousel

 

Run sand, hourglass

When it's my time, will I be worth?

Spin 'round, carousel

When your horse isn't screwed in

I couldn't do merry-go-rounds as a kid. Under any speed. I'd get green so fast that I never got any joy from the experience. I could practically fly up to the top of playgrounds and the deep ends of pools from the tender age of two, so I was by no means a tender child. If anything, I blazed circles of flame around other kids. They were standing still. From the high dive to the bottom of the pool, I remember the world as motion. As wind. As rush. The world was meant to be experienced as motion, as something to be joined in with.

But you put me on a merry go round? Oh man, get me off. Now.

Same with cars. If I'm not driving, I start feeling a bit green, sometimes very quickly.

The world felt still when I moved. So, as a child, I moved all the time. It also helped me process all the nonsense going on: rapes, beatings, fallings-out, and the list could just go on and on. Whatever it was, I kept moving. Whatever happened, I just kept jumping and vaulting and running and sparring and whatever it took.

Until one day.

When I just couldn't do it anymore. 

I couldn't move fast enough. No matter how fast I moved, no matter what I did, the spinning kept going, both inside and outside of me. At the age of thirteen I felt something break. And then I realized: I had to find a way to weather it.

So, I first had to figure out what exactly what I was running into. It didn't take long to realize that this nauseating experience was simply time. And time was apparently thought of as linear: one event went to another went to another to another. Each moment was unique. Something to treasure. Time was progression.

Out of all the lies I have been told, this is one of the most destructive. It has taken me well over twenty years to learn just how wrong it is. The experience of time isn't linear, it is cyclical. You are cyclical. You do not change. Your understanding of you may change, but you do not change.

Well, sorta, we'll get back to that in a minute. Just put a pin in "We don't change".

Every time, over the last twenty-three years, that I have thought "Ah, that's over and done with", I have been wrong. For, you see, the world (and therefore time) revolves, bringing us back to the same experiences of ourselves and of the world. History repeats. It takes longer to come back to the same world events under a different glamor, but they're the same events, whether you want to admit or not. Now, the usual brainwashing rot is to tell people to ignore this feeling of revolution, this sickening realization that yes, indeed, you have been here before, yes indeed, you didn't get away from it. "It's a new day! Don't worry! You're different this time." You're taught to look at the ephemeral qualities, not the archetypical substance of what it is you're encountering.

The gullible and/or brave manage. The gullible just find any of the ephemeral and inconsequential details they can to trick themselves. The brave throw themselves onto the merry-go-round, blocking out everything else until they finally collapse in on themselves, and if they're very lucky they'll get wise to the grift. If they're not, they'll become cowards/honest people. Sorry, brave and gullible, the cowards are right this time around.

The honest and/or cowardly start abusing substances, to dull the internal nausea, all the while everyone is telling them that they're progressing, not spinning! This level of dissonance between what you're told and what you experience usually creates bitter addicts who, if you get them into a corner and put a gun to their head, will tell you what's really going on. And don't worry, they'll usually get very poetic and specific about what they're going through. But you have to listen, without judgment. They all say the same thing. It's 100%. Sorry, brave and gullible, the cowards are right this time around.

"But wait, people change!" the brave and gullible will say. "I've seen it! With mine own eyes! And that's progress! That's linear! There's a clear change that makes that person different from what they were before!" Is that really true? Are we really counting the incidentals, the surface level stuff that doesn't mean anything at all? The inner experience of change has nothing to do with linearity at all. We've got enough universal wisdom to know that. The interior experience of change isn't that of linearity. At all.

No, things get quiet. Real quiet. And then something happens to you. One minute you're one way, and the next you really are something different. It's like this odd wink in time and presto! Well, if you're Christian you know it's not a "something", it's a SomeOne. God changes you. He acts based upon what you have sincerely tried (and failed!) to do. He sees the failures and your insistence on not backing down. And then He changes you, as much as you can stand. He'd do the whole thing at once, but there aren't many who can do a whole hog change like that. So, He watches you go 'round the carousel, with the unscrewed horse, and waits until you have built up enough hope, and then He changes you as much as you can stand. But you have to actively work at hope.

So, the thing that's being called "linear" is a combination of three different factors, one of which is outside of time. If you wanna oversimplify that to linear, that's your decision.

But that's reductive, unhelpfully so.

It doesn't describe the experience that people are actually going to go through.

People are going to come away with the worst possible idea of what the human experience, nevermind of God saving them, actually looks like.

But sure! Linear!