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Low Pressure

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It is said that some people are particularly susceptible to the decrease in atmospheric pressure that occurs simultaneously as dusk falls on a Sunday at the end of March. The change happens so quickly and forcibly that tormenting headaches and sensations resembling nausea cause healthy runners to double over, cooks at the stove find the closest chair and shoppers ask for the restroom.

I’ve also heard that some people are known to look forward to this temporary in-betweenness of a day, week and season as a source of creative energy and purposeful destruction. When the comforting, stable air surrounding the present can no longer resist the gravity of the future, regret collides with anticipation to generate a beneficial turbulence, not overwhelming but motivating. Problems solved. Branches trimmed. A word begging at the door welcomed in.

And yet another way of responding to this pressure involves intuition overriding reasoning, opening one up to the epiphany that dusk on March 27, 2022, contains not only the minutes of that particular day – but also those of years before and those way into the future, all mixed up, happening at once, now. As if this transition is, actually, profound: a glimpse into something beyond the mundane and we meet it wearing old sweats. With a headache or a check-list.

Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector offers: “Our mental fertility is astonishing. For centuries man has divided time into the seasons of the year. He has even tried to divide the infinite into days, months and years because the infinite can be inhibiting and torture the soul. And faced with anguish, we carry the infinite within the [scope] of our awareness and organize it into simplified human form. Without this or some other form of organization, our consciousness could be exposed to vertigo bordering on madness.”

I look outside. No teetering between times: the madness turned back, the profound up there, the night is decisive. It never arrives soon enough.