Interlude: economy of narrow seats

I open this page without clear intention. Perhaps thinking it might be a way to not notice time passing, while I’m trapped here between seats that are too narrow.

The narrow seats are thieves of my privacy and intimacy, killing any inspiration before birth. Greedy, not content with their plunder, they also rob me of the possibility of taking pleasure in what I’m doing right now. The position is uncomfortable. Even more so for writing.

I’m assailed by thoughts so fast I can’t even assign them that category. They must be feelings more than thoughts. The narrow seats, besides being greedy thieves, make ideas move too fast; they gain speed to maintain privacy and avoid sharing their intimacy.

There’s an inverse relationship between physical space and mental speed. The more cramped we are, the faster thought flees. A defense mechanism, perhaps. If we can’t expand the body, the mind tries to compensate, accelerating until it becomes indecipherable.

The first idea emerges that sparks my interest, or that I’m sufficiently agile to grasp, since I started writing: feelings are ideas with such velocity they don’t qualify as ideas.

They don’t have time to show their meaning and, therefore, reason doesn’t legitimize their existence; they have no place in the space of reason. Feelings as ideas that don’t manage to form because they’re too fast. Feelings are ideas without time to show their meaning. They’re the neutrinos of thought—passing through us almost without interacting, leaving only traces of their passage.

What they lack in slowness, necessary for reason’s scrutiny and validation, they make up for in intensity. Reason finds its arguments in processes of evaluation and value attribution. Not even light is fast enough to face feelings; they’re simultaneously before and after such processes; intensity exempts them from argumentation and judgment. Feelings as ideas that don’t have time to have value. Feelings as ideas that don’t pay the tax of argumentation and justification. They’re the tax evaders of the cognitive system, passing through consciousness’s customs without declaring anything.

Another perspective: feelings connect automatically to value attribution and thus travel directly to decision, to action, to reaction without passing through evaluation.

Could lucidity be the time one is capable of introducing between these processes? Could it also be what’s called wisdom, maturity, or experience?

Perhaps wisdom is just this: the capacity to slow feelings until they become thoughts. To domesticate them without killing them. To let them exist in the space of reason without losing their wild nature.

All attention is forced to scatter when the seat in front loses strength, because an organic finger from a transitory place has defeated a metallic button from a fixed place. That seat has become the narrowest and therefore transformed into the biggest thief of all seats. That seat, the one that steals most, the greediest of all, rises because a bodiless, faceless voice informs that the flying tube has begun descending back to reality; that the space between seats will soon cease to be seen and perceived. Only then will the seats stop being narrow and become honest and generous.

Another feeling comes, shouting loudly something almost indecipherable, letting through something like: “none of this serves, none of this matters or adds anything.”

But even this shout has its function. It’s the feeling recognizing itself, validating its existence through negation. By saying nothing serves, it proves it serves for something, even if only to remind us of the futility of certain reflections at certain altitudes.

Corroborating an earlier idea, not without some resistance (could this be lucidity peeking through?), I move to action, make the decision and close the page before necessary. After all, the seats not only didn’t steal everything but even left me with something.

They left me with this: the awareness that even in the narrowest spaces, the mind finds ways to expand. That feelings, however fast they may be, leave traces. That seats can steal space but cannot steal what we think about them. And that, perhaps, is a modest form of victory. Or at least a technical draw with the forces of aerial compression.