Table For One - In a Rush

You arrive at the restaurant, they ask how many are in your party and you hold up a single finger. For the party that is life, you have arrived with yourself only, so it's best to get to know her/him.

You know something is true if your family points it out. They have mentioned it so often that the words are nearly branded on your skin. It is as if they read it off your forehead every time you come into a room. 

The words on my forehead are “In a Rush.” 

From a young age, the ongoing joke in my family has always been that I act as if I am late to something very important. I have been rushing to catch up to something essential, something that requires my immediate attention since I learned to walk on my own two feet and for the life of me, I have not been able to figure out what I am running late for. 

An internal clock seems to sit deep within me, wedged inside my rib cage between my lungs, beside my heart, the ticking blends in with the pumping of blood so I can never be sure if it’s truly there, but the feeling that time is passing is always in the forefront of my mind. I feel like I must rush to everything, but the moment I arrive at what I was rushing towards I want to rush through it. 

I know I am not the only one walking around with an internal clock, so I hope if you have one deep inside of yourself, that you have found these words. There are many of us with internal clocks, there are many of us that feel like the moment we sit down to take a break, to take a breath, to rest, the internal clock within us starts ticking louder. One second wasted, two seconds wasted… thirty seconds wasted… get off your butt you are wasting time… If you have a clock you already know what it feels like. But I’ll be redundant. I’ll spell it out anyway. It is exhausting to walk around with an internal ticking clock. And if there is an off button, I have not yet found it. I have, however, found that at times I can lower the volume, sometimes even mute it altogether for a period of time. 

There are certain places I can go where the volume turns all the way down. There are certain things I can do in order to hear silence. I have begun seeking these places out, and trying to spend as much time as possible within them.

Writing is one of those places. When I write the only sound in my mind is of my own words, and it’s not like talking to yourself, it is different. It is like hearing your soul speak. When my soul speaks the rest of my body is completely silent. 

Reading is another one of those places. I spent my entire childhood devouring books. Books turn off the volume inside my body the way no other story-telling method does. Watching television turns the volume of the internal clock to HIGHEST POSSIBLE. There was nothing more anxiety-inducing when I was growing up than watching television. Every part of my body was screaming at me to stand up and do something else. 

Cooking is another place I can go to find silence. This one I discovered in college. Chopping vegetables, stirring them on the pan, tasting and adjusting every dish. And don’t get me wrong, I am not a chef, I am simply mesmerized by the calm that takes over my body when I am fully focused on cooking a meal. On Sundays I like to meal prep for the whole week and I find myself in a trance for hours. Chopping, stirring, smelling, tasting, boiling, blending, there is nothing like it. 

At this point I have mentioned three things that silence my mind, and none of them involve other people. It is very romantic to think that you can take a problem that is deep within yourself and fix it by being around people who you love– romantic or not. I’ve learned that I must first find silence within myself before I can take that silence with me to be with other people. If I try finding peace in others, I am filling my stream with buckets of water when the river within me was just a couple miles down the road. And the person who was handing me buckets of water is emptying themselves in the process. 

Table For One is a series of elongated thoughts on paper– or you can call it a blog– about finding out how to be okay sitting with myself. We enter this life with ourselves, and we spend every day until we leave with ourselves spending time – with ourselves. The first step to anything is knowing who you are, and who you are changes every day. 

If these words resonated with you, join me to keep reading. I would also love to hear my fellow internal clock people comment where you can go to find silence within yourself.