‘I am the habit of myself, and I live out the poor shadow of my life within the dismal confines of the Habit World’, I wrote in my trusty notepad, and then I stopped, overcome by a sudden wave of sadness. I had inadvertently hit upon something there I realised, and it didn’t feel good. I felt sad, so sad – the wind had been taken out of my sails and now I was becalmed in an ocean of unrelenting melancholia. ‘The habit-wind has been taken out of my habit-sails’, I quipped, but humour was not to be my salvation in this sad situation. ‘Salvation there was none and sorrow there was aplenty,’ I quipped again (by sheer force of habit really) but this attempt at humour left me feeling even worse, if such a thing was possible. And it certainly was possible, as evidenced by the undeniable evidence that lay all around me. My limbs were weighed down by that sorrow and there was nothing I could do but sit there, incapable of writing another word. ‘I am the habit of myself, living out my habitual life as best I can in the futile shadow-world of my own automatic activity,’ I whispered softly to myself, but my voice was that of a ghost. And a very sad ghost at that. A melancholic ghost.
‘Most of the good I did I did under duress’, I whispered again, after a long and mournful pause, ‘and there wasn’t very much of that anyway’. We are acted upon in life by a particular type of wind you see, the type of wind which compels. It compels our actions, our thoughts, our feelings. It compels everything about us. We are driven ceaselessly by that wind – we cannot shelter from it and neither can we fight against it. What are we to do, what are we to do? All we can ever know is obedience to this wind, nothing else exists for us. We are obedience, that is our nature. Every little bit of us is obedient to that wind, every tiny little bit. We will obey that wind, heart, body and mind, until the day comes when we can obey no more. And even then, when the day comes that death finally overtakes life, we will continue to obey – that’s how deeply the habit of obedience is ingrained! Even then, even then. Even the hand of death, final though its touch may be, cannot save us from that most dreadful wind! ‘I am the habit of myself,’ I whisper, ‘I am but a shadow of my former shadow…’
It’s a laugh, isn’t it? It surely is. Here we all are, blown hither and thither, and yet somehow we all seem quite content with this. That terrible, terrible wind – it doesn’t allow us to exist at all. It doesn’t allow us to exist because it takes us away somewhere else, somewhere else where there is no existence. ‘Help me escape from this awful wind,’ I whisper weakly, but these weren’t my own words – that was only the wind talking. It was just the wind blowing through me. ‘Help me escape from the wind,’ the wind whispered through my cracked and dried-out lips, ‘somebody please help me.’ When you see me dancing that’s the wind moving my limbs, when you see me smile that is only the wind causing my face to distort, and when you hear me lament, as I so often do, that is only the wind lamenting through me.
If I were full of holes then I expect that the awful wind wouldn’t blow me around all day long in the way that it does but I’m not – I’m solid, much too solid. Solid all the way through. If I weren’t so solid then the wind wouldn’t catch me in the way that it does, but I am and so it does. It never doesn’t catch me it tells me who I am, it tells me what I think and what I feel. Someone or something had been interfering with the reality-inverting mechanism and now I couldn’t tell what was me and what wasn’t. Some things were me and somethings weren’t, I realized. I was everything and at the same time I was nothing. Even the hand of death, final though its touch may be, cannot save us from the fate of which I speak. Every little bit of us is obedient after all – my toes are obedient and so are my eyebrows. Obedience is the name of the game around here, isn’t it? Obedience is the virtue in itself, we will not consider – not for a second – what it is that we are being obedient to. Anything will do, anything will do. And no one’s looking anyway, no one gives a damn.
‘I am the habit of myself’, I quoted my earlier self, ‘living out the poor futile shadow of my life whilst haunted by the knowledge, on some inexpressibly deep level, that this is not the way it was meant to be.’ ‘Here I am, adrift in a sea of meaninglessness,’ I cry out, overcome by the aching poignancy of my situation, but my words didn’t mean a thing. They never do.
