The Hysterical, The Lachrymal, and The Guilt-ridden Hour.

So much can occur in one hour, and in but a few blinks there have already been twenty-four;

that’s eight-thousand, seven hundred and sixty that go by in one year.

The worst of which can be broken down into three stages. The hysterical, the lachrymal and then the guilt-ridden hour. It’s human nature to be believe that we’re well versed in these three stages, when truly no one can tell. Hysteria has a million faces, of which no two are alike. Guilt is dark, secret, so private that words are foreign and speaking consequential. But lachrymosity, the vessel and fosterer of our primal instincts, houses itself safe and sound in all of us, our own private care-giver who gardens our essence and being so that we may grow; the thousand-year-old tree, houses the same instinct.

My moments of hysteria and control are almost an exclusive exchange between my feelings and the things around me. Swallowing as much as I can scoop up with my two hands. When my world warps and spins, and spins and spins – the easiest thing to do in these moments of terror I search for my anchor, chase after my north star. But often I find that, the things I grab a hold of crack and blister and burn and morph into my vice. What is there to hold on to when you’re afraid that your greatest weapon are your hands?

I don’t have the answer to that question, nor do I think that’s an answerable one. It’d only lead to more questions and more begetting, and more running and circles, hoping I’ll reach the answer. Only to find a more obscure question at that destination – some questions are just useless and don’t mean anything at all and I’m not here to take an endless quiz, but again I don’t know why I’m here, and that’s okay. And much of the time I don’t know what I want to do. I haven’t lived for very long, but you can only have lived for nineteen years and feel like you’ve been a thousand different people who wants a thousand different things, in which most are averse to one another.

I want to bend over, do a backflip and reach the part of my heart that lands on both feet every time; and perhaps that’s what I need to do. To imprint this temporary and perishable earth into myself so deeply, so painfully, and so passionately that its essence rises invisibly inside of me.

I could tell you all my thoughts on faith in thyself, and spirituality. However, what I think it comes down to is basic human urge and learning to reinhabit that part of ourselves. What drives you and feeds you – the force that indicates that the thing you love has a reason to be in this world. The proof is in the way that babies cry for milk, or the odour that seeps from blades of grass after being cut. It’s the lachrymal affect.

The lachrymal bone is the smallest and most fragile bone on the human face, roughly the size of each individuals little finger nail. Indicated at the front part of the medial wall between your eye and your nose, each bone is accustomed to the human it’s attached to, like some kind of work of fictions it has two surfaces and four borders. Several of its bony landmarks function in the process of crying. The effect of the urge drives me to do wild things; bones working out like muscles, to take me to where I must go. To see what needs to be seen. But also, to hear things that occasionally make me feel glad to be alive, and to wonder at the beauty of being human. Lachrymosity forces all humans to experience moments that vibrate through the walls of time, I believe.

Initially these vibrations quake and push me in the direction of shame and darkness. It may seem as though everything that felt meaningful is intrinsically tied to inspiration and spontaneity, at the best of times and at the worst of times. And when I act involuntarily on instinct, when my knee unwillingly jerks in the direction of the cause, I have made myself responsible for creating circumstance where I will experience them. But when we do things that we feel means something to us, we like to think that it’s because we tucked our hair behind our ears and hunched over and did the work which makes the guilt rip through us deeper due to this shadow of regret, we warped our experience into an instrument of pain. Just because we are human, and we are terrified, does not give me, or you the excuse to stumble into something motivated by chance. We need to learn to do more; meaning is a jumper we knit ourselves.

Like meeting your significant other at a party; someone at work invites you rock climbing and you love it; or getting into an enjoyable career because your parents made you study the degree. But if you’re waiting for these things to happen, then it’s a losing play. Do not stumble your way through life only to leave your essence behind.

Our essence wants above all, to wonder. But also, to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; I think that the most practical thing you can do is deciding to take the initiative and invite your friends out to try new things, do a hobby alone, host a party, travel, listen or watch inspirational people at the top of their field to see where you’d like to be. Really just taste things that might grip you, and then once you see something bigger down the line, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to progress there, tucking your hair behind your ears and doing it, and that’s meaningful. Even if you’re paralysed by choice, then tell yourself you’re going to do something just to prove to yourself that it’s not the right thing to do.

If it turns to shit, our worst hours can be boiled down to one at a time. That hysterical, then lachrymal, then guilt ridden hour… the essence of the moment softly trailing behind the meaning we wrap around it.