Sitting.

Sometimes I sit in silence for hours. I just sit there and think of everything–or think of nothing. I’ll sit on the couch or on the bed or at the kitchen table. But today it is the floor. The floor by the dying Christmas tree.

Four days until Christmas and the tree is already dead from neglect. Watering plants doesn’t really make top of the to-do list when you spend your minutes sitting on the floor thinking of nothing.

Except it’s not always nothing. Sometimes it’s lists. Endless lists of everything I have to do. Call this person. Pay this bill. Go to the gym. Do life. It buzzes around my head like a swarm of hornets blocking out the sound of any real creative energy that may find its way into my cerebral cortex.

Or sometimes my sitting mind is filled with a list of all the things I have done that I regret doing. Or perhaps I’m still doing them and I’m doing them wrong but I won’t realize it until I’m forty-seven and unhealthy and unhappy and by then I’ll think it’s too late because I’m used to doing it wrong and my youth is spent so what’s the point?

And maybe I’ll ask whether or not run-on sentences are sometimes necessary to emphasize a point.

My hands will grow clammy and my heart will pound heavy pulses of blood to my dizzy brain as it becomes increasingly overwhelmed by all the thinking I’m thinking.

But today I have no lists. Today I’m just sitting here under the dying Christmas tree away from all the lists and letters and living and wondering if maybe I’m a little bit strange. And maybe I’m wondering if I’m not the only one sitting under the Christmas tree a little sad for no reason at all.

Then maybe at some point I’ll start crying without reason. And maybe I’ll consider reading a book or watching a movie so at least I have a reason to cry.

But maybe I’ll think about it, and maybe crying without reason is far more profound than crying for a movie. Because there’s really no such thing as crying over nothing. Tears always have a purpose—and perhaps these tears are calling to my sitting body and my thinking (or unthinking) mind and perhaps in that moment I disappear from the world for a minute.

And maybe in that minute (and minutes to hours) I find a little bit more of myself that I didn’t know before. And maybe it all makes a little more sense. And maybe it’s ok to cry or sit or stare for hours and hours. And maybe I’m crazy but maybe that’s ok.

December, 2014