Give Me Something to Make Sense Of
Walking back up the beach, my partner suggested we should act normal. The wind-shaped trees made that instruction difficult to interpret. A little later, my mind seemed to make a more unreasonable demand.
We were walking back from the water to our towels during a high-dose psilocybin experience. Colours were richer, edges softer, and patterns repeated into themselves. The sand resembled a slow-moving ocean, with the wind pushing mesmerising ripples down the beach. Everything felt active. The beach was busy, and as we headed back towards our spot, my partner, half-laughing, said we should probably act normal.
I laughed and asked what that even meant. I gestured towards the trees along the edge of the beach. Were these trees normal? Which ones counted: the tall, straight ones, or the bent and twisted ones that seemed to have been shaped by years of wind and weather?
If the wind regularly bends the trees in a particular place, a bent tree is an expected outcome there. A straight one might be the unusual case. That gives us one meaning of normal: what commonly occurs under those conditions. The shape alone tells us less about a tree's health, and being shaped by an environment leaves open whether it has also been damaged. Calling something normal becomes less useful when we move between those meanings without noticing.
The comparison made me think about people. Economic pressure, instability and trauma can affect how someone responds to the world, so behaviour becomes more intelligible when the conditions are included. An understandable response can still be painful or harmful, and people exposed to similar pressures can respond differently. Looking at the environment gives us more to understand about someone's conduct, including the choices available to them. It cannot supply a complete account of the person.
After that, conversation dropped away. We kept walking, without trying to explain or extend the idea. Then my mind, apparently unsatisfied with the material already available, produced a sentence.
"Give me something to make sense of."
It did not feel aimed at the beach, the trees, or even the experience itself. It seemed to concern the fact that I was seeing anything at all. There was a feeling of demand behind it, as if scenery and story could fall away and the impulse would still be there, expecting something it could organise itself around.
For a moment, it felt as though the need to make sense of something came first, and whatever I called reality followed after. The things around me seemed like ongoing, incomplete answers to that demand, as if experience kept supplying something to work with and the mind kept expecting more.
I was standing on a busy beach, surrounded by sand, water, trees and people, while entertaining the idea that existence itself might be what happens when the mind's demand is answered often enough. There was something funny about how much had already been supplied. The thought implied that, even with nothing left, the mind would still expect an answer.