When is it alright to let go?

A 1am head dialogue.

Fred: Time is valuable, right? So isn't making the most of every moment
the best way to live a fruitful, fulfilling and worshipful life?

Edith: But rest is also valuable - so I am told. Not wasting time as
such. So it follows that making best use of time incorporates rhythms
of action and rest, involvement and retreat. This also releases you to
be creative, fully yourself, which gives glory to God. Besides which
your adjectives have lost their life - freedom isn't just about productivity
you know.

Fred: I know that. But then making decisions about when to do which involves a whole
head process, and a responsibility which brings you back to the same
problem as the 'overefficiency' quandary, surely?

Edith: Then again, why should you feel 'responsible' when you live
under grace and not law? Do you still believe that you are what you do?
What about love?

Fred: No, but time IS valuable. And we are in a sense responsible for
what we are given - we are called stewards. Besides, if you open
yourself up to love, you start to see things you want to see restored, changed, broken. You start to care. And then you want to use your time as best you can...

Edith: But sometimes it's alright to let go. To trust God. That doesn't
mean you cease to care - it's more about the right to control it. He
wants both you and the people around you to become all they could be,
to be fully free.

Fred: True - but when I let go I often block out the pain of others.
The need to respond. I feel like doing nothing except being selfish.
Edith: Are you sure you're not just afraid that that's what would happen?
Fred: Yes, I've known it happen. Right now I feel apathetic. I want to bury my head in the sand, or hibernate. Not to care.

Edith: What are you scared will happen if you do that?

Fred: I'm not scared - or, perhaps a part of me is, that I'll cease to
exist. The other part is more concerned that like every one else, there
is a selfish part in me that does just want the best for myself.
Edith: What about that everything will all go wrong and the people around you will fall apart?

Fred: Maybe. But also, it just seems like a waste of time to do that.
There's so much else you could be doing. No, you're right on a deep
level it is maybe more about the control and responsibility. Even when
there's good stuff mixed in.

Edith: Maybe you should just let go. Whoosh.

Fred: Easy for you to say... but what does that even mean? Do nothing? Do stupid things? Cease to think?

Edith: I don't know. I'm going to bed

'Falling, falling, without limits'

Panic: a sudden strong feeling of anxiety or fear that prevents reasonable
thought and action. (OED)

Oh I know the biological explanations, the chemical reasons and the evolutionary accounts, but isn’t it an extraordinary thing? That out of nowhere, all at once something can make you freeze, make time stop, steal your breath and cut through all your thoughts and feelings like a knife? Just like that.

I see it like a white dagger, or a lightning bolt that strikes diagonally, causing a momentary freeze frame that slows down time and sharpens the senses for a fragment of a second before vanishing into nothing and allowing the scene to jerk back into motion again, the same but all changed.

And then the reiterated slogan... ‘Don’t panic!’ Anaesthetize yourself, numb your responses; don’t react too violently, let a flash of a situation knife you into fear. Every where it is slapped up on pasteboard with a nice yellow smiley face.

Don’t panic! Don’t worry. Relax. Take it easy.

A slow progression into numbness like the gentle slipping into a swimming pool.

I just smoked my first cigar and my throat tastes of burnt toast.

I really like cycling at night. There is something about the coolness and the night
wind and the feeling of invisibility that always lifts me out of the humdrum. But occasionally I just worry I might career off the road...

Here is a quote on a previous thought (see chapter 1). It is about logic. Reading it reminds me that thoughts, thinking, imagination, reading and academia are not just for my head and its elaborate introspective projects, but are brought alive when they become spurs for action and conversation and sharing. It is helping to remember this now as I am feeling sorely tempted to run away into my own head world of imagination and ideas, which in fact, I have been reminded, doesn't exist in itself...

‘The final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its fulfillment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas which are not communicated, shared and reborn in expression are but [monological] soliloquy, ad soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.’

(Dewey – from his 'communicative theory of rationality and democratic social action.')