When Your Mind’s Made Up

When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point trying to change it
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point even talking
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point trying to fight it
– The Swell Season

The clink of thick water glasses is still ringing in my ears, and the blessed wine once therein still tinges every swallow as I walk away from the box that I’ve automatically routed myself to each weekday morning for the last four and half years. My feet are racing—driving—pounding towards the next year and the possibilities that lie therein. Ten years of carefully constructed roadblocks have kept me from walking this particular stretch of sidewalk, but today they have fallen into a lost corner of thought. With lyrics from The Swell Season repeating in my ears at a volume that drowns out all surrounding traffic, I am amazed at my ability to experience this moment. It is an anti-moment—the very lack of a moment left behind in the void of momentum—and my brain can only express it as the blazing white filter that I’m confusing with the haze from eyes squinted against the late-afternoon winter sun.

My mind has been made up for a very long time, and it’s only in this fragmented and augmented state that I realize there has never been a point in trying to change it. The mountains to the north and buildings around me stand more crisp and bold than I have ever seen them. It’s as though the very city itself is rising up to support me.

I can’t stop grinning.

Bukowski once wrote, “There’s no better way. There are moments of total flaming hell when you feel as if you’re going mad; there are moments, days, weeks of no word, no sound, as if it had all vanished. Then it arrives and you sit smoking, pounding, pounding, it roars and roars. You can get up at noon, you can work until 3 a.m. Some people will bother you. They will not understand what you are trying to do. They will knock on your door and sit in a chair and eat up your hours while giving you nothing.”

I know this is true, and I know I am walking into greater moments of doubt and fear than I yet to imagine. Yet, still I can’t stop grinning. For me today, Bukowski was right; my mind is made up, and there is no better way.