Friday, October 1, 2010

On being frenetic...

I have found myself on a bit of a tear since the Reunion. Flitting around at high emotional speed; writing long blogs about various sometimes interesting, but never particularly important things.

So now I believe - I feel - it’s time to slow down and just let things move as they might without trying so hard to push the river….


And this brings me around to the Reunion itself - the 45th Reunion of Huntington High School. Back long before the consolidation that closed the rivalry between Huntington East High and Huntington High and created one High School calling itself Huntington High, but using the team nickname from East High.

And this looping back made me - allowed me - to encounter people I hadn’t seen in decades, but also to crash right into emotions carefully packed away for most of those decades.

And my reflex - rational, but ill advised - was to flee those feelings as fast as I could!

And I did it on automatic - without knowing - at least not until after a few weeks of consideration and sage commentary from friends.

The closer an emotion - any emotion, pick your poison… - came to the surface, the more I became frenetic (or ‘frenic’ as I seem to want to say the word - and thus verbally representing the condition by dropping a couple of syllables!).

Now keep in mind that we humans perceive the world in any number of ways. Some of us are visual learners, some auditory or even kinesthetic.

But what I’m talking about goes deeper; toward how we engage the world.

One way is through thinking - through facts and sequences of logical processing.

Another way is to feel what is going on - to relate to the world not by asking, does it make sense, but does it feel right…?

Think Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy - thinking versus feeling.

— But is this actually true?

— Possibly… but it’s only necessary to accept it as a working hypothesis to make sense of what follows….

When confronted with a stressful situation we will fall back into the patterns of behavior that have worked in the past in the hope that if it worked once, by golly, it will work again!

And it does, but at a price.

My friend Ed (a feeling type I suspect…) observed it in me as hyperactivity so extreme that I truncated words and became mildly (I hope) incoherent and (probably) dyslexic.

There I was at the reunion speaking rapidly, dropping syllables, probably omitted entire words - likely even reversing word order so that a simple message of “it sure is hot,” might become “issue snot…” or some such nonsense.

When my brain couldn’t keep the gut reactions at bay, I became physically hyperactive rarely stopping my movement round and round the room. During the 4 hours of the Reunion I ate only a few carrots and had nothing to drink - even my appetite gave way to my quest to crush the ‘dangerous’ feelings that were trying to make my acquaintance…

Let me give you an example.

I was jabbering at someone and even managed to shut up for a few seconds to pretend to listen - er, rather, I did listen, but by that time I was sizzling too loud and could only hear my internal circuits frying….

And it seemed this person couldn’t comprehend me. I kept getting odd looks and blank expressions….

What was wrong with this person…?

Nothing, of course.

But the way my perceptions spun, I was barely present! I certainly wasn’t communicating. And, worse, I managed to project all my own faults onto the person I was talking to!

How nutty is that!

So, anyway, that’s why I have decided to slow down on the blogs. I will go to one per week or less, unless something really significant comes along - as in that series of really important blogs on Vampires….

… Or I become so frenetic I can’t stop….

First draft written 13 September 2010, completed 30 September….

1 comment:

  1. Jim, I too experienced some of the blankness that you described. I think it was because my hearing is bad in combination with the music being too loud!
    Great post,
    Ray

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