Another word for this disruption might be ‘trauma,’ which refers to something real, but which is used so indiscriminately, to describe the consequence of events in the personal and psychological lives of individuals, to those individuals, that it has lost something of the gravitas that belongs to it when it is uttered by a clinician.
diary /
By which I mean, I suppose, the disrupting of equilibrium, in the psyche, that accrues to any person who has lived long enough to have known even a little of suffering.
diary /
For the mind has a willfulness of its own, and is pulled this way and that by memory and experience, and by how these things involve themselves in whatever sensations are present to the individual as they navigate the landscape of daily life. Which is why, if one isn’t careful, and doesn’t inhabit the now with attention, one will find that one’s wits become prey to the lapses in judgment and apprehension that result from what I can think to describe only as emotional karma.
diary /
On a branch of a tree that stood outside a house some distance along the sidewalk, I happened to see two squirrels, playing or squabbling (I’m not sure which), and so, because they were the first things to impress themselves on my senses in a way I hadn’t expected (the scene otherwise arranging itself in accordance, I suppose, with my subconscious rendering of it), I started in their direction, or in the direction that they inhabited, relative to me, though when I arrived in their vicinity I did not stop to watch them, or to speak to them, but continued on past them, so that I could no longer see them, my awareness of them already yielding to an awareness of other things (where I was heading, which way I might turn once I reached the corner of this block), though they had likely produced my awareness of these other things, insofar as, in the continuity of time, one thought leads to another, so spontaneously and complexly that I’m reminded of the firing of synapses in the brain, and would be hard-pressed to describe the order in which such thoughts occur, and for what reasons.
diary /
I left my apartment and went down the stairwell and out through the vestibule and the front door of the building to the steps that mounted to the sidewalk, and stood there for some time in the snow, not sure which direction I wanted to go, for I had no destination in mind, other than where I was now (or had been until a minute earlier), which was not so much a destination as it was the locale of my return, from I which I needed nothing, or sought nothing in particular, other than the circumstances of rest and necessity of which one is rarely conscious, but which form the purpose of one’s dwelling, and to which I would arrive after an interval of wandering that I had not premeditated, or considered in any detail, for it was late afternoon (almost evening), and I was ready to divest myself of the business and preoccupations of the day, and to find in the randomness of the sights encountered by my vision, and the instincts of my body for exertion and respite, whatever inspiration for thought, reflection, or imaginative fancy, may or may not be there.