บท 3: Immersion
If there was anything I've learned after five years of mindlessly slamming my fists against the hardwood target at the dojo, it was the perfect coordination between my hands and my perception of the world!
Or so I've thought.
As it turned out, mashing my fists at a certain, steady rhythm against the hard, wooden dick of a practice target, had little to do with fine-tuning the delicate movements of my hands to properly mold and shape different materials with the help of various tools.
First, I cut the stack of cardboard boxes into one pile of bigger and one pile of smaller pieces. I did so with relative ease. But when I moved to cutting smaller elements…
The idea was simple.
By stacking several layers of the pizza tops or bottoms and adding a honeycomb-shaped filling made with the smaller parts, I could create a surprisingly sturdy element. But doing so… Forced me to create rather tiny and short strips of the smaller cardboard parts before…
Carefully and attentively arrange them on all the layers with the help of the hot glue.
Yet, the very moment I completed this procedure for the first time… I've glued another, bigger piece before starting it all over again. And then again. And again.
And again.
One by one, I've replicated the entire process, only to soon find no more of the filling.
The amount that took me a good while to carefully cut out only lasted for a mere two layers.
And so, I cut more of it out before getting back to the task.
One by one, I patiently conquered the steps of the way from a blueprint to a finished product.
Then, by the clever use of double-sided tape, I stuck the whole thing firmly on the wall, creating a precious storage space for this relatively empty room of mine.
The high rent forced me to stay in this place, all in a bid to spend just a little less to somehow manage with my strained finances. And with the addition of the huge mess, there was practically no room left in my… well, room.
Taking a deep breath, I took a step back and sat down on the bed. I then lowered my eyes to the mess on the floor.
Surprisingly, just by gathering the potentially useful stuff, I've managed to clear up quite a bit.
And after a deep sigh, I moved up from the bed and started to clear the stuff off the floor.
Bit by bit, the mess that flooded my place became nothing more but two, orderly organized piles of stuff.
A process that took me merely ten minutes…
'Wait.'
I slowly raised my eyes to where my clock overlooked the room.
"Oh shit."
The realization dawned upon me as I looked at the two arrows on the clock's face.
'Late!'
My first instinct was to drop everything and rush outside, hoping to overcome half an hour's distance in mere minutes left until my shift was supposed to start.
The second thought was to just ignore it altogether and leave the issue for later, a relict of my past approach to life that I've put all of myself to rein in.
But with a third thought, I reached out for the phone and selected the right number for the occasion.
[I'm dying on the shitter, can you get my shift asap?]
Upon pressing send…
I hurried and turned the phone's signal off.
This was the minimum I had to go through to build a case for why I couldn't come, less I wanted to risk the job. Thankfully, I was merely one of the guys on the shift rather than the sole cashier of a small shop.
And with some more time now left to my sole proprietorship, I've turned my eyes to the two piles of stuff I formed while cleaning.
'There has to be something else,' I thought, already moving to stack the crafting-aligned tools on the newly made and installed shelf.
Now that I've regained around ten times as much space in the room as I did by installing the new shelf, I've suddenly felt like… doing something else.
'Maybe this is the feeling the old man was talking about?' I thought, looking down at my hands as I closed and opened my fists.
Then, I quickly found another tutorial on the phone, using the home's network over the phone's own data now that I've cut all the direct connections.
And after staring at the two piles of junk and trash, I've finally decided.
A sense of challenge pushed me forward, edging me on the idea of crafting something new.
'This doesn't feel all that bad.'
I've pulled out all the parts that I thought I needed before double-checking the recipe on my phone. A quick view of the tutorial video I found later, I've already sorted the few resources and tools I had before… relaxing and taking a deep breath.
I did it thousands of times before.
Over and over again, I've gathered and enclosed my thoughts, focusing on the target ahead. Just, this time, rather than striking the target with my fist… I moved them to create something new instead.
Bit by bit, all the other thoughts vanished, leaving my head empty, bristling to fill with nothing but the task ahead.
And so, by pushing past the limits of the agility of my fingers, I started to dismantle… something.
It was a strange feeling, to be aware I wasn't lucid and yet… loose the track of certain parts of reality.
I couldn't really see, sense or understand what I was doing, blind to the great workings of my own hands.
And as the task grew more precise, sweat started to slowly trickle down my forehead.
Off to the side of the bed, a nicely-edited video taught my subconsciousness how to make whatever it was that I started to do… All the while my consciousness sank down into a strange place, too relaxed to care about the weird stuff happening.
It was a strange feeling, to be so relaxed, and yet… To feel the heat and the burden of the precise engineering I was somehow making happen with my hands. I could feel the sweat trickling down my face as I focused more and more, only growing number to the actual reality.
Sometime in that process, my sweat ended up falling down directly on the screen of my phone, causing something to happen, turning the video off and switching some random stuff…
But by now, my intuition of the moment somehow took over.
I didn't need the tutorial anymore, with my hands easily keeping a good job without the instructions.
And then, all of a sudden, everything came to an end.
I took a deep breath, suddenly all frozen in place when this weird experience came to an end. But as I moved, my head naturally bobbed down, bringing my creation to view…
'What the hell is this…?'
Whatever it was that I was trying to do… I either couldn't figure out its purpose or, much more likely, it was far from finished. There were some traces of distant concepts… but the whole thing just didn't have this aura of a complete product.
Much worse, though, I couldn't really recognize… anything.
Any part of the work-in-progress of my subconsciousness…
Meaning, I didn't learn a damn thing!
'Even if this was going to be something great…' I thought, clenching my fist as I realized I'd just wasted pretty much everything of any use left to create something that looked like a malformed ill-intent from another dimension… and had no known purpose.
Regardless of what this thing could be if finished… Again, I didn't learn a thing.
"…!"
It was merely the act of closing my fist.
But as I did so, it felt as if… my fingers moved through some sort of… fog?
There was this intangible drag to those movements as if my fingers had to force their way through some medium slightly thicker than air.
'Don't you tell me…'
Pushed by the feeling, I swung my arm around a bit…
Only for this strange resistance to vanish right after.
It was but a fleeting feeling that I could experience while keeping my hands relatively still. But there was no fucking mistaking it!
It was the Qi, the spiritual power that I've failed to obtain even the slightest bit over the last five years!
While I still didn't know how or why…
I've finally managed to meditate!
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