Newton's Laws and "Normal"
Falling out of bed and the laws of gravity as they pertain to being present
In small, seemingly fleeting instances, I find myself thinking nothing at all. A good song will come on, or I’ll be watching the rainfall. Or maybe I’m on my stomach, circling a pencil across the pages of a coloring book like when I was a child and I’ll feel it: peace.
I always find myself asking, is this what it feels like to be normal?
In these moments, I am not overwhelmingly happy. I have made no grand discovery. I am a woman, sitting in silence, aware of my body and that it exists, and that I am a living creature.
It makes me realize how often I forget; how often I get swept up in the act of living that I forget I am alive.
The mistake I made for so long was chasing these moments because I thought that if I could experience them, the normal was somewhere in me. I could pull it out or I could eventually become it. One day, someday, I could be normal.
Today, I finally understood it was not normal I was feeling at all. It was present. I wasn’t stuck in the land of yesterday, pondering mistakes I’d made or things I’d been through. I wasn’t in the land of tomorrow, thinking of things I had to do or daydreaming of the person I might become. I just was.
Even as I started writing this, I began to lose it. The presence. Will I decide to post it? Will people like it? Will it resonate? It takes more effort to be here than it does to be anywhere else. I could lose myself in ended years and coming ones more easily than I can exist in this ticking minute.
The question, then, was not how to be normal, or even how to be present. The question became why is it so difficult. If the past is painful or nostalgic, and the future is uncertain or terrifying, why is it so challenging to exist in this moment? Why can’t I do it on demand?
Is it because being is not productive to anyone but ourselves and so we’ve equated it with laziness?
Is it because being makes you aware of your body and what you’ve hidden away there?
Is it because being makes you feel?
If being truly wasn’t that hard, why not do it on demand? Why not always...just be?
Then I had a thought; so much of the beauty of being…of realizing that I am a living thing, a person who is alive, a woman who breathes in and out, who exists in her skin, who can listen to music with a coloring book alone on a Friday night…the beauty of all this came from how often I am not being.
The fleetingness of being and the gift of remembering you are alive is the very essence of living.
I’d like to think of it like that falling-out-of bed-feeling you get sometimes, affectionately referred to as a hypnagogic jerk (cousin of the equally hilarious and common myoclonic twitch. Google it. You’ve done it or someone you’ve slept with has). Not all falls are created equal. If living is free fall, realizing you’re alive is the hypnagogic jerk. Let me explain.
Think about the concept of free fall motion. Free fall motion is the idea that when objects are not encountering a significant force of air resistance and are falling under the sole influence of gravity, all objects will fall with the same rate of acceleration, regardless of their mass. Theoretically, regardless of your size or weight (don’t get technical on me, I know) you eventually fall at the same speed as everything else. With no ground beneath you, you could fall forever. My friends who have been skydiving tell me it feels quite nice. Falling becomes the new normal. It might be pleasant but, eventually, it just becomes a new state of being.
A hypnagogic jerk, on the other hand, wakes you up. It shakes you from sleep and makes you clutch your chest. You check your surroundings. Am I here? Am I okay? Did I actually fall? From a state of rest or disconnection, you are aware. You are alert. You are alive and, while occasionally annoyed you’ve been awakened from peaceful slumber, you are grateful to be.
Now, it has crossed my mind that there are people in this world capable of being perpetually present. There may even be people who benefit from it. And that must be wonderful, but I don’t think those are the people I write for. They are not the people I relate to.
If you’re like me, for one reason or another, there’s a reason it’s difficult to be present. There’s a reason you don’t default to today. Maybe today used to not be safe. Maybe today used to be the saddest you’d ever been, so you got used to running away to yesterday or tomorrow. Maybe it’s not that tragic. Maybe tomorrow seemed more interesting or yesterday held more joy—I think that’s fine. Not all of us are meant to live in today; it sounds like it might get awfully crowded.
There is an ever-growing focus on the idea of being present with no forethought into what the present used to or could still mean for so many people.
We do not have to stay here. We can be dreamers of tomorrow or archaeologists of yesterday. Numbers were put on time so that humans could quantify it and write it down. Once they could quantify it, they believed they could tell us what we can do with it. How to pass it, how to waste it, how to cherish it, and how to use it.
They wrote history books and hung artwork from people we’ll never meet in museums. They showed us everything that could be built for the world and for ourselves and we both feared and craved a world that hadn’t been created yet. They made us fall in love with moments from the future and the past, and then they said, “But this is today. You should be here.”
They introduced the concept of perpetual presence as the best way to live, and then they made it feel like that is what it means to be normal.
We are not chasing normal. We are not abnormal for throwing our energy into living the best ways we know how— as long as we continue to remember, fleetingly, that we are alive.