2/24

i'm thankful for a form of pseudo-meditation i have been trying lately since buying a small bag of balloons in the checkout line at walgreens on a whim. i'm thankful for the way inflating a balloon concentrates my exhale, gives it form. i'm thankful for the sensation of stretching out the end of the inflated balloon to tie it off. i'm thankful, then, to do something which could occupy me endlessly when i was a child, which is keeping the balloon up. i'm thankful for the way that unlike a helium balloon, a balloon filled with breath will fall, but slower than other things fall. i'm thankful for the way the physics of it magnify effort, how a small tap is enough to send it off on new vectors and curving splines. i'm thankful that its path is predictable, to a degree, since that allows for me to lock in on it, engage, but i'm thankful that there are enough variables (the roll and tilt, the exact direction of the force) that you can't get into a rhythm and zone out and start to think about other things the way you can sometimes with more rhythmically predictable forms of exercise and meditation. i'm thankful for the pleasure of the balloon getting away a bit and me catching it at the last second with a tap that snaps it back towards me, ready to be volleyed again in another second or two. i'm thankful, as a person prone to magical thinking when low, to know that nothing bad will happen if the balloon hits the floor and sometimes to just let it happen to prove to myself that i know.