This is me on a day in my past. An important day. A day I didn't know even happened until now, I didn't know there was a photograph of this moment. I was pleased to find it. Turns out, for a long time, I was trapped inside myself; a wooden statue unable to grow or change. I constantly found myself waiting (hoping) for a major event to break out from the cocoon, but thinking like that allows one thing to happen: the wood begins to petrify. All around you it alters your perception of that long standing hope, for that one event to happen to make everything OK. Turns out this is the wrong way of looking at things.
I had it all backwards.
What would happen if the world stopped spinning? More the point, what would cause the world to stop spinning? That's when you find that the event you had been waiting for has already happened. That's the first step, realizing that when your world stops spinning, it was that one cataclysmic event that caused it to stop. And there would be no major event for it to start back up again.
Like I asked, what would happen if the world stopped spinning? It wouldn't start back up with the grace and speed that it once had. It would begin slowly and take its time. Hell, there's a good chance that when it did start you wouldn't even know that anything had happened. But it has.
Behind the scenes.
So while you wait for the event to happen, the one that already happened, hoping it'll change everything in the blink of an eye, like it already has, you become trapped inside yourself, locked in a wooden state, unaware of the minor changes that happen to allow yourself to break free of the prison you have built for yourself, unaware that you are essentially free from that prison, all you have to do is walk out the celler door.
But you can't.
Because you're trapped inside yourself, a wooden version of who you are, who you once were, and who you want to be. Your eyes are open, but you can't see the world around you. Time is different in this place of personal limbo. You feel older, worn out, faded. You tend to dwell in it, because it's comfortable to be inside yourself, even if its causing you pain, you are your own oasis in times of happiness and despair.
Then on that important day (which was photographed with out my knowledge) you begin to crack the wooden cage that encompasses everything about you. You get a smirk on your face again, your eyes widen and begin to see again.
That's it. You're free and you don't know it. You won't know for quite a while.
It's in that moment, where the event you're hoping to happen that has already happened, when you finally overcome. And the drunken miserable shlub that fell into a wooden cocoon is set free and changed. The changes are subtle, but eventually, you will be staring off into the darkness, or the waves of the sea, and you will realize everything that has happened. Then you'll simply turn your head to the side, and squint, just a bit, and you look at everything around you slightly different. You will maybe find that you're a writer, and that you are OK and the world is spinning again.
You brush off the few remaining splinters from your time spent as a wooden statue. But three will always remain.
One to remind you who you were.
One to remind you who you are.
And one to always remind you who you want to be.