My Poem ‘The Overview Effect’

I feel like I have returned from death, returned to life,
I feel like I have been resurrected.
For over a week, I lay helpless in my bed,
as my thoughts and dreams went into overdrive
and manifested into different and varied guises,
colours, textures, and ideas- some that I do not remember entirely,
some that I choose not to recognize.

At some point in our lives,
we all have this urge that appears before our eyes
that tells us to look within and begin a journey to find ourselves;
there are so many schools of thought on the subject
of how to embark on the ultimate journey of identity:
a walk in the woods, a prolonged period of silence
and deep-thought around a fire,
reading a thought-provoking book-
all methods that I would recommend, which have served me in the past.
Being ill, however;
having your body and mind feel like they are turning against you,
feeling like you are locked in a prison cell
with your worst enemy: incapacity.

This new year has not began as I had hoped.
Unfortunately, the normal feeling of euphoria of Christmas
did not carry me over the cusp of New Years Day
with the normal feeling of joy and the smile of happiness on my face.
I felt like I had been struck by lightning
and had fallen from the tallest building in the world
to the hard and unforgiving ground below,
and it all happened so fast,
and I didn’t know exactly what had happened, I didn’t feel a thing.
I was broken. I just wanted to feel better,
and for all that I was feeling and experiencing to come to an end.

No one is a statue. No one is bullet-proof, untouchable,
unfliching of the debris of life,
and everyone is stricken from time-to-time by something
that feels foreign and alien of themselves,
that is not easy to purify ourselves of;
we all must accept that life itself,
and our interactions with what life has in store for us,
is nearly always going to be out of our control.

For the last seven days, I feel like I have been in space-
circling the world, instead of being a part of it;
coccooned in a bubble; fighting to find my way back
to feel well again- almost forgetting what normal
everyday things are that we take for granted:
the taste of food, the feeling of sunlight on my skin,
forgetting me.
Coming back to Earth now, finding my feel on solid ground
after so long of feeling weightless,
I am still regaining my balance,
I am still finding parts of my life to reconnect.

How I am feeling now is better than I was,
and I hope I continue to feel that way.
What I am feeling now makes me think of the memories
and recollections of the astronauts who went into space
and their perspectives of seeing the Earth from so far away,
and how seeing it changed them:
a way of seeing the world, which I see and understand now,
that has been called the “Overview Effect”.

Advertisement