Rumination

Rumination is pernicious because it disrupts the two ancient analogies that are us; space and time.

Space

We are defined by the idea that we have an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. These are the spatial analogies of human experience and broadly these analogies must be in some recursive and circular relationship with each other. They must be in balance, with each analogy informing and inventing the other. Difficult or traumatic experience in one analogy ordinarily privileges and preoccupies the person in the other analogy. For example, a traumatic relationship experience on the ‘outside’ may well preoccupy a person on the ‘inside’ resulting in rumination. Such rumination unbalances the circular, recursive, relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. As each analogy is an ‘at the ready’ well of dexterity and flexibility for the other analogy. Rumination strips away recursion and such dexterity.

Time

As humans we are temporal and we rely on the balanced and recursive relationship between time past, time present, and time future to maintain our equilibrium. Each influence and shapes the other. Time is geometric. Rumination paralyses time, alters that geometry and strips a person of their unique time future, preoccupying them in that black hole that is the pernicious relationship between the present and the past. In that flattened geometric space, compressed and flatlined, we approach something like a living death, an endless anxiety. Of course, it passes, but with difficulty. When the elixir of time future is stripped away, it does not feel like that.

Space and time are internally circular, balanced, and recursive or at least they are meant to be; and externally, between them, circular, balanced, and recursive. Time is space and space is time. As it is, each becomes the other. Rumination is an unseemly, largely unintentional, assault on all of this, believing, instead, in its own truth, a false and poisonous god.