A few weeks ago, as I was filling out a 21-page ADHD assessment, I paused at the following question:
Prisoner of the moment 0 1 2 3 4 5
Most of the other questions were formatted as statements, things like “Short attention span, unless very interested in something,” or “Frequently misplaces things”.
I didn’t know what “Prisoner of the moment” meant, and so I tentatively left it at zero and emailed the psychologist to ask her.
She answered: “Being a prisoner of the moment means that you have difficulty thinking ahead. Whatever is happening in the here and now emotionally guides your decisions.”
I moved my response to 5.
Ever since then, I keep thinking about the phrase, Prisoner of the moment. It feels so ominous that I want to laugh just to release the tension.
This morning around 7, I looked out my window and saw the beginning of a sunrise. The clouds had parted at the horizon and there was a patch of blue light preceding the sun. For at least a week, the mornings have been a flat, brightening gray. I had forgotten about sunrise, forgotten that morning could include discrete clouds refracting sunlight. The sight of color in the sky surprised me.
Because it has been raining for days, I know only rain. Our back pasture has flooded and the flood has been growing. One evening when the rain paused, I moved fencing so that my chickens could avoid the worst of the flood. When I woke the next morning, the flood had spread. What had been dry ground for my chickens last night, was now a shallow pond. The pond, eight inches in its deepest spots, is a weird stew of muck, dead grass, and chicken poo. The whole pasture feels like a biohazard. Yesterday (I’m so sorry to report this, but I have to) I found a small drowned rat amidst the chaos.
It is deep winter and I feel leaden. As I walk though the flooded pasture I’m overcome by dread at the endlessness, the repetition: wet, dark, wet, dark, wet, dark. There is no promise of a break no matter how much I need one. I think of one of my favorite Samuel Beckett lines: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Winter is a Beckett Play.
I just drank my last sip of coffee and now there will never be any coffee again.
I just looked at the ten-day forecast and I will never see the sun again.
I feel slow today and I will never know speed again.
I don’t want to write today and I will never want to write again.
In an attempt to escape the prison of the moment, sometimes I get in my car around 5 pm to go run errands in the dark. I talk to myself about how in spring and summer 5pm will feel spacious and bright. I’m trying to make myself feel better, but it doesn’t help at all. Spring feels so distant that it’s irrelevant—something that will happen to a future person in a future time.
What did help was reading Sarah’s post last week, where she described the darkness the same way I’ve been experiencing it. “The wet-gray of a Pacific Northwest winter is a weight we carry on top of the usual heaviness of making it through each day.” It helped to know I wasn’t alone.
And then it helped to think ahead—not all the way to spring, but to late winter. I asked the internet, When will the sun set at 5:30? The answer: February 11. That is five weeks and four days away. If I can’t dream my way to spring, then I can trudge through the next 39 days anticipating not a blinding brightness but a little peek of light.
This reminds me of what happens when I work with my somatic therapist and she is trying to help me move through a difficult emotion. We start with the physical sensation: What does it feel like? Say the answer is a marble stuck in my throat. Though all of this is imaginary, my therapist proceeds with caution. She doesn’t ask me to cough it up or dislodge it. Can you find just a little bit of room for that marble? she asks me. Can it turn? I close my eyes. I imagine it turning. I settle a bit. Healing, I’ve learned from her, is sometimes about creating just enough space to live with what is.
And so I try to make room for the marble. I try to take a deep breath even though the rain remains relentless. I try to shift from prisoner to inhabitant.
Workshop Announcement
Registration is now open for an 8-week generative writing workshop, Joyful Practice for Dark Times. We’ll come together to feel and express the hard things—grief, fear, despair—and in doing so to make room for what can heal us: delight, intuition, and connection to a shared spark.
Each session will lead you through a progression of exercises designed to tap into the collective unconscious, share inspiration, and connect to what you need to express. There will be time to share work, discuss creative process, and learn from each other.
We want this workshop to a playful and restorative part of the week. You can find more details and register here.
Wonderful statements for being in whatever moment you mention. May all the people in your neighborhood, as well as the chickens and geese who wade in 8 inches escape from the wetness when the sun comes out.
“Being a prisoner of the moment means that you have difficulty thinking ahead. Whatever is happening in the here and now emotionally guides your decisions.”
And yet, I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing. The quote by the therapist seems to suggest that you are staying in the present tense, not what my late daughter would call "future tripping." To not be able to plan ahead, or envision tomorrow, may not be so bad. Because on a deeper level, how can anyone know what will happen tomorrow, or in the next 5 minutes or so? That being said, I can understand (and I've been there before, too) the discomfort in feeling paralyzed, which is another type of experience.
But in the winter, and especially now as I face a foggy morning, there are other moments of being, where I sense that something is fermenting, coming to the surface, coalescing into something that will eventually need to make itself known. I suppose this all might mean that nothing is simply one thing?