Insight can feel like blindsight

Insight can feel like blindsight.

You awake to a feeling of navigating your life reasonably enough but without any cues and clues. When pressured, things seem to work, must work, and bring your behavior into a sufficiently coherent whole. While your mind sails on a surface of unpredictable needs for wanting life without any feeling for its will, like the fickle foam of waves, washing your gaze to the shore, covering the hidden depths of one’s volatile self.

When I awoke, I lay awake for a while. I sensed the clock menacingly advancing the point in measured time at which it usually reminds me of the conscientious ways of doing the day. Doing the day. I lay awake, in wait for an opening. But the time came when daylight reached its point of restlessness. The now inescapably routinized day came down upon my frail breath to close its doors on my mind. And my mind followed, closing the doors on its self.

Like blindsight, the mind does not sense itself, disconnected from its environment, as it performs the self in senseless acts of navigation, nonetheless. I walk and I talk, and, at night, I wonder where I have been. If your mind cannot sense itself, how can one feel seen by other minds? And yet we crave that mirror image to bind this subconscious pilot of a self to a self, if only a mirror image. But a tangible self.

The dog watches as I walk. She knows. She lies awake, her head following my footsteps as I walk the walk between the kitchen and bathroom. Once the coffee machine has stopped its blubbering noise, she gets up. This is the sign.

The day has begun.

My mind looks at its self. This has come to be a strange year.