Essays

On Digestion

I am finally receiving the hardships and blessings I have prayed for for years.

Nowadays, time disappears throughout the day: small talk with my manager about his diet; calling my mom to see how she is doing (why isn’t she calling me anymore?); the red minibus filled with silent strangers (I finally have a book to read); a hastened thirty-minute conversation with a friend you’d like to properly connect with. All of it done in a rush, a rush toward some imaginary finish line, a red carpet at the end of it all with a plush bear standing there, waiting to shake your hand and say, “You did it! Well done.” Yet I never even had time to reflect on where I had actually arrived.

I’ve realized, only recently, that reflection is a privilege afforded to those who can slow time down. A mother dressed in a white apron, smoking a cigarette in the morning while bacon sizzles in the pan in her other hand and Frankie Valli plays on the radio, has no time to reflect or philosophize about the direction her life is headed. Life is boiling for her. She has set the boundaries and mechanisms of life in motion, and now they are doing their clockwork for her. Yet she does not know whether, in twenty years, she will be satisfied with the path travelled or regret it. Most people receive this privilege only when they get older: the kids leave for college, life becomes slower, and there are suddenly memories to remember. Or when life becomes so unbearable that the only possible way up is to look inward.

Inward. 

I used to be surprised by the thought that if one were to cut open a body, they would find that it is dark there; that anatomy textbooks had lied to us. Without an external source of light, entering the body would be akin to entering a dark, grotesque cave full of slimy vermin. Modern medicine gave us the privilege to do exactly that: to dive into the depths of our bodies and patch up whatever might be interrupting the natural flow of life. Diving into the depths of our minds and souls is a discipline much older, and arguably much more complicated. But medicine gave us flashlights and instruments for one’s darkness; the other still has neither. 

Recently, I have tried to enter that cave and found that I can’t. There is always something waiting for me there first. Walks to the river, where my ducks are usually waiting for me to talk to them, become invisible. They are replaced by tasks I was too hastened to accept, past dialogues with things left unsaid, or anticipation of tomorrow- which, of course, will be much better than today. And even when the ducks do appear, some melody colonizes the silence, pulling me back inward. I am alone, but never quite empty; always somewhere in my head when all I wanted was to be beside the river.

Perhaps this is what I am missing. Not experience, but the time required for experience to become mine. For it to gain weight, but also somehow become unburdened. I have managed to create an environment that I no longer have to police because I am not a kid anymore. Events, relationships, books, small rituals and conversations seem to arrange themselves naturally around my days, and I am happy to let them have a will of their own, unbounded by strict time constraints. And I love it. I feel connected to the world in ways I had not before. But the day is finite, and the night eventually comes, no matter how much we want the sun to keep shining. And in the morning, it starts again with coffee, and continues forever.

Yet within this life I often wonder where my creativity has gone. Is it the Lithuanian weather that stole it? Or did I leave it on the red bus, beside the driver who, rather than replying, “Good morning to you too, good sir!”, looked visibly irritated and ignored my enthusiasm for that particular Friday morning? I seem to be collecting more than ever, but transforming less of it.

My days are full of things that should produce something in me: strange conversations, people I love, books that rearrange small parts of my mind, new spaces that had remained hidden from me in plain sight, nightmares, daydreams, good food, strangers whose faces I slowly become acquainted with. Yet they remain largely as they arrived. Experience follows experience too quickly for one to decay into thought. Maybe creativity is not creating things. Maybe it is digesting. Something enters you, sits there, loses its original form, collides with everything already inside you, and eventually dreams itself into a place and shape in your mind. A sentence. A star. A person. A bird. Some stupid observation about a bus driver becomes important three weeks later for reasons you cannot explain.

Digestion requires stillness, not movement - in conflict with the unspoken rules of Russian folklore. Perhaps I have forgotten how to be still. Not asleep, not tired, not simply waiting for something else to begin, but genuinely still, with no expectation that the hour should justify itself afterwards or produce anything worth carrying into the next one. I had much more of this kind of time in August, though the month itself was hardly empty or uneventful. If anything, that was when life seemed to open up most fully: people were away, the city felt looser around the edges, the sun made being outside feel almost compulsory, and I could spend whole afternoons moving through the day without feeling that every part of it had already been assigned a purpose. There were walks whose only achievement was eventually bringing us back home, long stretches of sitting somewhere without checking what came next, and enough space between one thing and another for boredom, curiosity, or some stray thought to take over on its own. I was living then too, perhaps even more intensely, but the life around me still seemed porous enough to let thought pass through it.

And now I have it, which is perhaps the small cruelty hidden inside answered prayers: eventually you have to live inside them, and the things you once imagined would make life feel fuller begin to occupy the very space from which you used to imagine them.

I do not want fewer people in my life, fewer books, fewer conversations, or fewer mornings when I wake up curious about what the day might do to me, sometimes with another person still lingering somewhere in the room or in my thoughts, and I do not want to dismantle the machinery I spent so long building just because it has finally begun to work. I only want to occasionally step outside of it and watch the gears continue turning without me, to let something that happened on Tuesday remain unfinished until Sunday, to allow a conversation to rot a little before I decide what it meant, to let a book sit inside me before I open another one, and to walk to the river without feeling that I need to extract anything from the walk.

Perhaps, then, I need to learn how to waste time again, properly and without embarrassment or heckling, by sitting beside the river long enough for tomorrow to stop being interesting, for the unfinished dialogues to finally quiet themselves, and for whatever melody has occupied my head to run out of itself, until, eventually, the ducks become visible again.