inthewater

There’s something so much more romantic about ships than any other form of travel. Waving goodbye to family on the docks. Leaving the land and setting out into the ever-moving current.

I keep having waves of extraordinary equanimity. I very much feel like a domino in a chain. All of my responses seem like they are floating there, happening to someone else, yet I am more engaged than I have ever been. I can choose whether to go on the rails or whether to just observe, quietly and happily, like the umpire in some underwater tennis match.

But what is this observer? This observer is conditioned too; I trained this part of my brain to hold on when the storms would hit. This is the part that kept me together when undiagnosed adhd was trying to tear me apart. And now it feels… liberated. Free-floating. Almost as though it has its own little space carved out, like a tadpole in a gelatinous sphere, unaffected by the currents that tossed it around before.

Where I used to hold on for dear life and grit my teeth to get through things, this membrane around The Kid is fluid now; it absorbs the waves for me and deflects them with all the effortlessness of seaweed in the swells.

I can see my own bigotry coming up and half-smile at it because I know all these things are just part of a chain of cause and effect. Bigotry about someone’s silly crocs or how they are holding their beer or how they look stupid or obnoxious. There’s no venom there any more; I’m just gently looking at it, like I can see the currents in a body of water that no longer dictates my motion.

I can feel the elevated dopamine in my joints; the silken movement which I felt with aripirazole. This time it’s endogenous; I can control it and almost make it appear on tap. It’s becoming clear that the computer games and flashing lights which used to keep me going were like a man jumping from rock to rock to try to cross a stream, having forgotten that he knew how to swim.

Now I am in the water. There are times when the current does grab me, but they are few and far between. I had another difficult conversation today and was able to express my unhappiness without being swept away, and when we changed the topic the negative feelings just melted. I was no longer in that situation and the dominoes stopped their fall.

This is so hard to explain. To many it will sound like I am detached or dissociated. But it’s precisely the opposite.

Because all of these feelings can just melt once they have drifted through my being, I am able to be fully engaged with the next feeling that comes along. Yet at the same time, I am able to observe it and release it if I deem it harmful to me. I am no arahant so I do get swept up at times, but those times are becoming ever more rare.

I feel my head moving side to side like a balinese dancer and I roll my neck and the vertebrae feel lubricated, pliant. My body and my mind no longer resist me. I no longer perk myself up at night with neurotic drive, launching myself from one phasic spike to the next. I no longer hyperfocus.

I have never known such complete control over myself before.

But what is doing the controlling? Is it The Kid in his bubble? I don’t think so. I am still a conditioned being and these impulses and thoughts come; they just don't force my hand.

The experience of nibbana was the unconditioned; that is for sure. The Kid is the one that brought me back. But nibbana was the skilled butcher and the cow’s hide has been severed. Not completely, but probably more than it rightly should have been, because of the long half-life of the drugs that triggered the encounter.

I love that sutta. Imagine a skilled butcher came with a sharp knife, and he severed the ligaments and tendons of a cow and removed the skin, flawless and without error. The same butcher then put the skin back on the cow and asked you to inspect it. Is the skin still attached? No, bhikkus, it is not. Can it ever be attached again? No, it cannot.

This is how I feel about my suffering or my self. I do not mind how things proceed. I am particularly equanimous at the moment, and the last few days have been dark-nighty. I’m sure I will continue to cycle as the butcher comes in for smaller cuts. But I feel like nibbana has severed the ligaments around the shoulder, neck and hips, and the remaining cuts are small and effortless by comparison.

I still have the urges and feeling like I should not be so happy to do nothing, but these are mere habits. Conditioned feelings. Dominoes in the chain. They are not ‘me’. Is The Kid ‘me’? I think not, but I can see how someone would believe it was. I think the kid might be the knife, in the hand of nibbana, observing and severing and setting himself ever more free.

I have no idea what will happen with my life. I could die today. I am not afraid of it. I am happy to have been able to experience all I have in these last few days, weeks, whatever. The timeframe doesn’t seem important. This is a lasting feeling now, endogenous, not induced by drugs or an external circumstance.

This is a rising tide and it is washing away all of the junk that I never chose to pick up. It is a boat, out of port, and where it will next land I cannot say. But the boat is free, floating, rocking with the currents of the ocean in which it moves.

I have never felt such pure love for my family. It’s so hard to explain how you can both be more engaged and more disengaged than ever. Just focusing on the moment, not a bag in hand, slightly afraid yet ultimately confident.

This is good. Let’s watch it unfold.

/jb202509221742