Absent Minded Friends

Karolina Manns
19 hours ago
6 min read

Letters from the Sidelines of a Burning World

Shall we drink a toast to absent minded friends?

Everybody raise your glasses

Drink and drown

Are you numb enough?[1]

I sometimes wonder if art has the eyes to the future.

Consciousness is not bounded by the linear concept of time, the notion of present, past and future, and therefore perhaps those who create art are those who can foresee the future. As if they are living these timelines simultaneously. As if they are channelling what’s to come and inadvertently create our future of here and now.

Not all brilliant ideas came from us, meaning: our little ego. Most come in the form of dreams or ideas that somehow are cleverly inserted into our mind.

The Sunset Birth (1942) by Ithell Colquhoun — *The Sunset Birth* (1942) by Ithell Colquhoun

Madonna once had said that she had no clue where her first songs came from. She doesn’t come from an artistic or musical family. She was a dancer, not a musician. And then one day, she was sitting in her small apartment in her early days in New York, and those songs just came out of her. Or rather, her words, not mine: she channelled them.

Ha.

In 2019 I went to Govardhan Eco Village in India and did my 300hrs Jivamukti Teacher Training. We chanted a lot. One of the mantras we recited on repeat was: Make me an instrument for thy will, not mine but thine be done.

I remember, at the time, I wasn’t convinced about this message. It sounded too religious. Too preachy. And above all, shouldn’t we be chanting words only in Sanskrit?

But some things take longer for us to get. Sometimes you need to come full circle. That mantra back in 2019 was just a seed. That month with my teachers in India was a seeding ground.

But I’m digressing.

Since breaking my patella last year, things have never been the same. The stillness that followed the years of break-neck speed living was like a meteor that hit me. It annihilated me.

First was the depression. As if I was dropped into the canyon of despair. Thankfully, since my time in India, 6 years had passed and the seeds that had been planted then were starting to sprout. And they were strong little seedlings: I haven’t reached for any of my usual go-to coping (aka: numbing) mechanisms. I ate my depression raw. Straight up. Staring at the face of the darkness without blinking.

They say that the above mantra is a prayer of self-surrender and humility. And it was. Oh, it was. My little ego and its lifelong lies were slowly drowned in the lake that burned with fire.

And all I could do was sit and watch and hear. And in the process, I started to discover why am I here.

And ideas and dreams were starting to pour out of me. As if I was getting a glimpse of what will be.

Yesterday I finished reading Fahrenheit 451. They call it the ‘prophetic novel of a post-literature future’.

It is terrifying because it is true. It’s happening right now. Right in front of our eyes.

It’s as if Ray Bradbury predicted it in 1976. It’s as if he could foresee the future. He was channelling the future.

One of the characters in the book remarks how life sped up so much that they had to stretch the billboards on the side of the roads for the cars to even notice them. For the message to last.

Everything became a blur. Green patch – oh yes, that must be grass. Pink blur – probably a rose garden.

Those who drive slowly go to jail.

Ha – don’t we all feel superior for being fast? How dare other drivers take their time!

And at some point, the book and the reality I see around started to merge too. Was the author living in our times? How did he know that we’ll be rushing so much?

Impatience is worshipped. Busy-ness is glorified.

Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugees.

Everything becomes shorter: our words, vocabulary, concentration span.

We do do do

go go go and

build build build

but never ask ourselves why? We’re like the kids in the sandpit spurring each other on: build faster faster faster. The castles in the sand.

Small talk replaced real talk. We stopped talking the meaning of things, we just talk things.

Faster faster faster

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel [like] they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.

Oh, wasn’t I like this for most of my life? Fahrenheit 451 burns lesions in my skin because it’s so true. The number of self-help workshops I’ve done and books I’ve read. All these trinkets of the New Age absurdity. It so brilliantly fills the void in the cavity of our hollow chests. It fills the void of our empty, albeit busy, existence. The New Age pseudo-development. Substitute for progress. Doing lots, going nowhere. Just another egregor.

I wrote about this restlessness phenomenon I’m seeing around me on many occasions. The absent-minded friends who resort to texting and never calling. Those who ask about my aching shoulder but not about me.

Those who always go somewhere.

Faster faster faster

Those who cannot commit to anything just in case something better comes along.

Those who wear their busy-ness proudly as if they get brownie points for being human doings but never human beings.

And those who need to announce to the whole world through the lens of social media how busy they are and with what junk they filled their day.

Do you even breathe sometimes? I’m tired (and bored) watching the spectacle. Who are you performing for?

Faster faster faster

I write all this because I’ve been there. All of it. The burnout. The overwhelm. I did it all. Fahrenheit 451.

And then the meteor hit me. And it made me observe the world from the sidelines for a while. And what an interesting watch that was. And how maddening.

The universe slapped me in the face with the greatest smack and delivered a gift at the same time. It shook me. It woke me. The gift of vision. Like in the Myth of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who receives the skill of prophecy but is cursed to never be believed.

They say that the blind are never free. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the opposite: it’s the ignorant who live in bliss.

The speed, the busy-ness, the restlessness, it’s all yet another way to numb. To not see. To not live. Because maybe we forgot how to live.

We teach our children how to build things but never teach them why.

Faster faster faster

I’ve done so many things in my life, and I never asked myself why.

Because the doing was the prize. No, not even that. The being seen doing things was the prize. The gold medal.

The speed and busy-ness give us the illusion of happiness. People want to be happy. We’re perpetually in search of happiness. (The book ‘In Search of Meaning’ comes to mind but I won’t even go there…)

Let’s keep them moving, let’s keep them entertained. As a yoga teacher, the New Age stuff comes to mind. It’s just a repackaged old story. We swapped suits for saris, drugs for Ayahuasca, yoga for puppy / wine’o’clock / goat yoga entertainment. All for five minutes of pleasure. Titillation. Distraction.

The supposed happiness ends when the drugs stop working. When we get sick or burnt-out.

Sometimes that sickness is a blessing. That accident was my gift. Thank you to whoever is looking after me to not allow me to waste it. Or to miss the meaning of it. Or worse, to blame the universe for the gift.

To stop and to live. To be alive. And like in the Bhakti mantra Make me an instrument for thy will, make the universe speak through me. So that I can channel the future in motion now. Just like Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451.

And to become a channel for love, pardon, faith, hope, and joy.

But that’s for another time.