How to calm your atoms

Instructions for bodies of water.

Some discoveries are like the atomic bomb, once invented or experienced cannot be unknown. When you body has a feeling, it does not just simply go away. Feelings were not invented for your convenience, especially if you’ve been informed already that you are the only one holding such inconveniences. Feelings are like water, I’ve been told. And we are made mostly of water, I’ve been told.

One cannot wait for water to boil by simply watching it, nor at the same time wait for water to freeze by keeping it hot. In fact, water cannot simply disappear even if it evaporates because instead it dissipates and the particular atoms will continue to exist around you even if less concentrated at a time.

So instead, take the atoms of the water you hold and appreciate that they’re alive at all. Examine it, and ask yourself what has awakened them…perhaps the recognition that your water has discovered that you’re not the only whale who has remembered how to feel the color blue, or to observe the whimsical treasures that may at anytime appear at foot on a random walk. Rejoice in that you are not the only person aware of a certain planar of existence, and that perhaps this is a sign that you’ll be able to find others who share that same love of gentle attention for the whimsical as you do. And if it’s important for another body of water to inform you that they observe and cherish you, that maybe another form of water will choose to confidently find you too.

Now that you’ve appreciate the quality of this uniquely awakened water, look around at the garden you tend. Put that same appreciation of your newly discovered form of life and pour it into your surroundings. Mix that water with the pigments of your own existence, and paint with it the ideas you need to bring to life. Perhaps by painting with that water of yours, those who recognize the uniqueness of these same elements will boldly find you in your journey to paint the world with that contagious beauty…the poetry of enjoying the details of how we are, and not simply what we have become.

I can see how bonded whales may realize that some waters cannot seem to be calmed. How cruel of us to ask one to lose awareness of a world that cannot be unknown, or in fact at all unneeded. But while some things are worth never experiencing at all, some things are life itself and ignoring life is just an act of death.