Spidermind
Written June 2nd, 2007.
The world swiveled a little last night, rotated a few degrees to present me with a new eyeful of things. New strange feelings - or maybe just old feelings that felt new and strange when received through this different lens.
I found myself asking: What is the price to be paid for being plugged in, for being connected to the people I love?
I lose the people I am. Being plugged in initiates the ADD functionality of my brain - if I'm plugged in, there's one thing I'm doing and keeping up with. My mind spiderwebs out-- multiple legs of attention reaching down thread-trains-of-thought and fat-white-spidermind-me sitting comfortably in the middle of my spidermindweb, not really moving or changing or learning or growing, just monitoring and directing actions. I talk to half a dozen different people while reading about the rest of them, and then I have an ear towards my mate and an ear towards my music and an ear towards whatever he might be watching and how many ears do I have anyways? How many threads can I gather to myself before I am paralyzed with the effort of keeping up just watching them? (A lot. I've reached that point before.)
Plugged in. It is necessary for people to feel that connection. For most of my day-hours, it is necessary to be plugged in, so that I can function quickly. I can't force myself to unplug and do something I do not enjoy. But if I'm plugged in, I assign one or two spidermindlegs to weaving that unpleasant thread and keeping track of it and acting on it, and the rest of the spider-me is still in a central place, the middle of the web, and I can pay attention to other threads while still getting things done.
My spidermind doesn't like moving - that's what the legs are for, gathering threadthings and bringing them to me, not actually moving me from my place in the middle of my web where I can monitor everything. If I move at all, I am by necessity moving away from as well as towards something, and what if that thread I'm leaving behind is important? What if someone has something to say? What if this or that? I like seeing everything. I don't like turning a blind spidereye on something just so I have that extra eye to spare for something new, or to double-up eyes on something important. To move I must defeat my own inertia and watchfulness to focus. To move so that I might learn and grow and live, rather than exist as a monitor of my own lifeselfweb, a spectator of my own existence.
Sometimes, I need to unplug. Usually late in the evenings or in the middling of the day-hours, I need to step away and go to a different place in my own head. When I step away, sometimes I just plug into something else - a web of alternate realities, of worlds and creatures and stories. That, in and of itself, that web, is life too, my lifeweb too, just another piece, another part... and stepping onto that web allows my other ones to become bright and strong again. Changing webs keeps them all interesting - there is always a sense of newness and appreciation when I return to any one web. And I have many, many lifemindwebs.
Sometimes, I need to unplug in a different way. Just to stop listening, stop monitoring, stop analyzing and thinking. I need to turn off my senses that I spend so much time honing, shut down the self-and-external analysis that is constant and also well-honed, and just exist. I retreat to the couch to pay attention to only one or two things, or I go outside so that the wind can fill my flesh and take away the fogs of my own whirring mind, or I shower and let the hot water and steam rinse away all the thoughts stringing onto my webs.
But for the vast, vast majority of my day, I am plugged into one web or another, sitting and monitoring. To learn or dare requires more focus - more spidereyes, more spiderlegs, and motion from the spot of the spectator into the role of the do-er. My spidermind is constantly analyzing, reacting, observing, integrating information, and directing my thread-attentions and my physical actions according to the processed, digested, defecated information that goes through me. It means I am clever and keen and witty, that I multi-task well, that I am efficient. It means I can be spilling my emotional soul to one person and appear completely normal and fine to the rest. It also means that I am not expanding my spiderself. I am not evolving; my database of knowledge is just growing, but my me isn't growing at all.
There's a balance to be had. I struggle to find it, but I am realizing more and more that I need to be more unplugged from everything, not just unplugged from the normal-web and plugged into the other-realities-web. I have reached a point where I have flat-lined... I cannot increase my knowledge much more at all without moving, without becoming the do-er more often. But I can't stop spiderminding completely... literally, I cannot, as I would cease to function in the material human-based jobs-and-rules world.
Time to make a new balance. Time to stop being a fat-white-spidermind and become a longlegged-white-racing-spidermind, who can spring from one thread to another and then back to the center of it all and away again, without gathering inertia of stillness or motion. Both are dangerous to me. I must be able to change, stop, and start as I need to. It will take a lot more energy and want to become the racingspider, but it will be much better for me.
And a long-term, gradual change it will be.