Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

Every year I set a raft of New Year's Resolutions. Some are quantifiable pass/fail type resolutions and I typically hit about two thirds of those, and carry forward the failures to the next year to try again. I also usually set one or two "soft" goals, things that I can't readily quantify but still want to try and do better with. Things like "spending more time with friends," or "being more agreeable." This year I wanted to spend more time out of my head and in my body.

There was an old science fiction short story (whose name I can no longer recall) that I read in the 90's about a world with self-driving cars, which at the time seemed completely science fictional rather than merely near-future fictional. One of the conceits in the story was that people would gray out all of the windows of their car so they couldn't see what was outside and just tell the car to take them somewhere unknown at incredibly high speed as a form of recreation, which they called "spinblind."¹

I've often thought back on that story because the sensation of disconnected motion, of motion uncontaminated by knowing where you're going is a familiar one. The feeling of being buoyed along without being conscious of where you are or what's going on, reminded me of a mental state I get into sometimes when I'm playing video games or watching television or doom-scrolling, where I feel mental motion but not motion towards anywhere in particular. I experience a convincing simulacrum of psychic or intellectual engagement, but I'm really not there in the same way that I'm there when I'm walking around, or reading a book, or writing.

So when I say that I'm trying to spend more time in my body, I mean that I want to spend less time in my own personal spinblind uselessly hurtling off into the unknown, and more time with my countenance composed engaging with the actual world.