I’ve been away.

Not my body but my brain.

I was meandering along my trail, minding my own business, noticing this and that, our politics especially, the curse of consciousness, when I was tackled, kidnapped really, by a little book.  This kidnapping redirected my attention, as kidnappings will. Suddenly I had something I had to say, something that felt urgent. My intelligence was being held hostage by this imaginary imperative, I could think of nothing else. And what I had to say, had to, was hard, beyond my competence, yet I had to try, or else… I don’t know what. The feeling was like falling in love – irrational, irresistible, uncomfortable, inconvenient, perhaps unwelcome, perhaps ludicrous, but there you are, in its thralls, there’s no denying, no choice. Inspiration some might say, but no, that label’s too pleasant – desperation’s more like it. Does anyone enjoy subjection, even to one’s own idea?

I spent a fortnight wrestling my attacker, taming it if possible; I’ll share the result if I deem it worth your while. My interest today is the phenomenon of absence, how we can be torn from our quotidian into a new preoccupation which erases our concerns from before. Falling in love is one instance, a loved one’s hazard or a grim diagnosis or a reassignment or relocation are others. We were one person yesterday and today someone different – for who are we but our thoughts? We blink, pinch ourselves: Will the real me please stand up?

A discovery of retirement is the instability of consciousness. Capricious attention may be an age-old concern, but the exigencies of our job wrangled us into focus. Pilots on duty aren’t allowed to drift off. Retired, with less we have to think about, what worries nag or topics lure?

My concentration has always been flighty. In grade school I got A’s for achievement and E’s for effort. Distractibility was first diagnosed by a Scottish doctor in 1798, but it wasn’t till my tenure it was labeled ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or, more recently, ADHD, adding Hyperactivity to the brew of woes, and prescribing pills to quell them. I’m a big fan of chemical cures – they’ve rescued me more than once -- but I suspect they’re overprescribed. Restive curiosity may be a blessing, not a disease.

Instability of consciousness ignites the ever-ticklish debate about identity. How much of me is innate and how much a result? Am I meant or accident? Is the guy who boasts of “knowing his own mind” smart or dumb?

The answer is… we have no idea and no way of knowing. My convictions may be a contagion caught from friends and chance, or a revelation gushing from my gut, or a bit of both. Few scrutinize themselves more intently than I and I remain a mystery, my existence a nonstop suspense story. I wake wondering who I’ll be today and what I’ll say.

And what a gift that is, to inhabit a world ever new! Many folks cling to the familiar, fearful of venturing far. What if they get into trouble? What if their complacencies collapse? Religions count on this fear to seatbelt souls in their pews. They decree right and wrong, no ifs or buts, damning any who veer.

My first fifty years I obeyed the rules of my tribe, breaking rocks as bid. Then I broke, fled, scrammed, morphed into someone new, recognizable in form but spiritually strange, an outlaw even. I would let myself be who my moment made me, sing whatever song, say what I saw.  I’d let myself be abducted by the unexpected. It’s been fun.