Yes, I’ve been hopped up lately.  Thinking of my mother’s life and death a lot as the apartment where I spent time with her the last twenty years was sold yesterday.  Excited about the workshop with the nine kids grades 2-5 that will begin a week from yesterday.  Hopped up about the state of this apartment, which has been this way for a long time and needs to be fixed up.   Hopped up that I am drawing the same picture over and over, reading, emailing, reading, listlessly surfing the internet, drawing the same picture.  All around, the chaos I would tame, looking on mockingly.

Exhausted, truly.  Eyes tired all the time, reading a novel in too fine print, staring at this screen for hours at a time.   I can’t look away, even to make a long overdue appointment with the eye doctor.  Too many details to take care of lately, too many things on my mind.  Tired, yet unable to sleep for ten hours or however long it would take to not be so tired.  The picture I keep drawing finally tells me to stop it.

Immobile, drawing the same picture over and over, staring at the computer screen.  Thinking.  “Stop thinking so much,” says Sekhnet, echoing the voice from Ecclesiastes “For in much wisdom, there is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow” Ecclesiastes 1:18.  But I can’t help it, Ecclesiastes, old boy, not to say there is much wisdom in my vexation, nor agreeing that increasing knowledge necessarily increaseth sorrow, you know, I’m just sayin’.

Saw a Ted Talk by a man named Sugata Mitra, whose research shows the power of groups of poorly educated children to learn and teach each other what they are motivated to learn (watch it here, I recommend it). He concludes that “values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed.”  This is a very deep conclusion, if you ask me, comes close to the core of what’s wrong with the world we live in.  

He also concludes, as I do, that “learning is a self-organising system” (he spells ‘organizing’ like a former subject of the British Empire).  In other words, individuals and non-hierarchical groups can learn what they need to learn in an organic kind of way that reveals itself as it goes.  I’m in the process of trying to prove these very things, even as I can’t clear off my kitchen table or desk.

So the mind doesn’t stop thinking and the body doesn’t start doing, except to dance here on the keyboard, eight fingered, with the right thumb playing bass on the space bar.  I’d be better off sitting at a piano keyboard, or playing a guitar with eight fingers.  But even that wearieth me, man.

Why am I not going to sleep?  Most people in my time zone are having some serious REM sleep about now, dreaming.