Outside the flames...

You’re out of bed now, and you’ve had your cup of coffee. You’ve taken your pill, and you’ve eaten breakfast.

You walk, past houses with laughing families inside, past children running in their yards, and find yourself on Main Street. You didn’t pick this particular direction. You simply started walking, and your feet brought you here. The sidewalk is clogged with cyclists in skin tight outfits, men and women drink steaming cups of coffee as they sit on iron-wrought chairs, tourists gaze through camera lenses at this beautiful place.

These people (every smiling face, every warm conversation) don’t bring you joy. Every person you pass raises your heart rate. Each step you take intensifies the tempo of your gait. You don’t smile back at them. It’s not because you’re inconsiderate. It’s not because you despise or dislike them. It’s because if you take your focus off your breathing, if you pause for that brief, millisecond smile, your thoughts will take the reins and spur your temples. You’ll sprint–running from something you can’t escape–until you careen off a cliff edge.
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So, you don’t smile back. You trudge on with military rigidity, robotic movements, zombified expressions.

You walk like this to expend some of the cortisol your brain has dumped into your body. It’s a consequence of our evolution. We no longer live in harsh environments where we have to worry about being eaten by lions or trampled by rhinos. We have cars, and jobs, and bills, and families, and money. A whole new category of stresses, but no real way to rid ourselves of them. If a lion chases you, adrenaline and cortisol are used by the body to make you run faster than ever. If your bills don’t get paid on time, they don’t chase you down the street until they lunge and bite into your neck.

It builds up.

It shortens your breath.

It shocks your system.

Fight or flight.

So you walk to burn it off.

But it builds and builds because even when you’re walking you’re thinking and when you’re thinking you’re examining all the possibilities in life be it for the past, the present, or the future and these thoughts continue on and on in an endless stream an endless run-on sentence where you can’t remember what the original point was but you know now that you can’t stop the train until it crashes into the station killing all the thoughts at once but when this happens another train pulls into the station and leaves with a whole new crew and far more passengers than the one that crashed.

You sigh. You feel the tears building beneath your eyelids. You feel a sinus tingle on the bridge of your nose that tells the eyes, “It’s okay, let them go.” And you cry. You’re walking and you’re crying in public. You think you look like a lunatic but you don’t care because these tears release pressure.

You feel relief.

But it’s brief.

You may be outside the flames, but you still feel the heat.