Stop the world

Ever since I've become an adult it seems, I've had these periodic freakouts. When everything piles up in my head and the curtain of the present hangs too thick to see my future. The world starts spinning faster and faster and it becomes hard to breathe, hard to focus on anything except staying afloat.

These times, all I really want to do is take a break. Step off the carousal for a moment to rest my dizzy head; get out of the river before I'm swept away. I have a fantasy of being able to step off the world for a brief time, take stock, get settled, rejoin the fray refreshed and ready.

I've traveled, and taken breaks from study and work. I've locked myself in my house for a week. But the days still fill up with stuff, and I am forced to emerge, with nothing to show for my time out than gaps in my resume and a new knowledge of daytime television.

But the thing I realise now is that you can't get your life together by dropping out of it. The world never stops or slows. The only reality we have is right now. The past and future have no existence beyond our experience of them in the present. So the only way to take stock and learn how to live your life is to live it. Live it completely and totally. Let yourself be washed away with the deluge and learn to swim, feel the giddy rush of speed. It's happening anyway. It's only when we stop fighting the torrent that we can look around at the bank. When we realise we're not drowning, we're surfing the ocean of our lives.

Anne found a stone in the gutter today. It's smooth and solid. "It was covered in dirt," she says. "I picked it up and rubbed it and it became beautiful."