My fidget spinner came in the post today. I couldn\u2019t help myself so I opened it as I was walking down the street. It fell out of the cheap packaging so nicely, straight into my outstretched hand. I held it up against the sky to see its contours more clearly. It had three gorgeous white curves flowing from its design. At one point, while holding it aloft, I couldn\u2019t tell where the clouds began and where the spinner ended. In that brief moment, I thought to myself, they seemed to become one. I kept walking to work with the spinner in my hand but I didn\u2019t want to spin just yet. Something needed to happen first. Something significant, something I couldn’t really place just yet\u2026I prepped myself though. My god, you better believe I prepped myself. I stuck my tongue determinedly into the cool breeze and held out the spinner with my free hand. An old man in a dark brown coat walking towards me frowned. I panicked for fear of being misunderstood so I quickly motioned to the spinner and drew a rapid circle in the air with my free hand to illustrate my purpose. The old man then saw my objective, grunted in approval, took off his hat and nodded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSpin well my son. Spin well and may your life be blessed from this day forward\u201d he said and then shuffled on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With my long flowing hair and corporate skirt I am clearly someone\u2019s daughter and not someone\u2019s son, but regardless, I thank you, old man. Often, it\u2019s hard to rotate at your own speed in a world bent on rotating you at its own. Your acknowledgement and transient presence in my life will long be remembered and cherished. But for now I kept walking. A little further on, I smiled to myself and whistled for a moment into the oncoming breeze. That old man was truly something, I thought, but it wasn\u2019t exactly\u2026it\u2026\u00ad\u00ad<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was now almost at the city and looked down at my watch as humans are wont to do when wearing such things. The square digital face beamed up at me and delivered the bad news. With all my thoughts being directed at how best to spin the spinner I was now running late. So in my dainty flats I started to graciously lumber forward, wild giraffe style, towards my goal of work and sadly away from my goal of finding the perfect moment to spin. In times like this I lament that work takes me away from my passions so easily, so quickly cutting me off from my soul\u2019s true purposes in life. As I ran towards the place of people in suits my forward motion necessarily made the oncoming breeze feel stronger. I shed a brief tear at this moment as I realised the metaphorical value my motion and the breeze had. Alas, the more one strives forwards in life, the greater the head wind they make for themselves, and the harder the going is. Perhaps going backwards is the answer? Going with the breeze, with the tail wind, with the flow of everything\u2026 At this point the magnitude of this zen discovery overwhelmed me and I slumped down on the side walk sobbing heavily against a grimy wall. Tears poured from my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhy!?\u201d I cried out. \u201cWhy must there be head wind?!\u201d I screamed up at the curvaceous clouds in the heavens. \u201cI just want to spin! I just want to flow!\u201d I choked on my sobs and then saw a lady next to me sleeping on the sidewalk in a not-so-washed and fairly aromatic sleeping bag. She pushed away her matted grey hair from her face and looked at me with deeply recessed eyes. I wanted to know what she knew; I wanted to know what street wisdom she had gained, I wanted to know that her desperate existence had added some value and wisdom to her life, that it wasn\u2019t all for nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy lady-\u201d I began but she hushed me with one of her sooty fingers against my lips. Her finger did not taste nor smell as pleasant as I would have liked it to so I nodded quickly and pushed her hand away. \u2018It is not your fault dear lady, I wonder deeply what encounters led you to be here but at the same time I respectfully decline your finger so close to my mouth\u2019, my eyes tried to say to her. The grey haired lady pointed to my fidget spinner and then up to the clouds in the sky. I nodded slowly and mouthed a wholesome \u2018thank you\u2019. I stood up, stepped out of the shadows and away from the grimy wall and held aloft my white fidget spinner with the blue sky and fluffy clouds as the backdrop. I held the spinner with its magnificent three bulbous prongs above the horizon in front of me, directly above the city where I was meant to be. Where society told me to be. Where my place was carved out for me by the men in suits. But the clouds in the background and the empty patches of bright blue sky didn\u2019t enmesh well with the spinner\u2019s shape at all. I felt uneasy with this dissonance. Sickened even. I moved the spinner around the sky above the city and went from cloud to cloud but no matter where I placed it, no matter what angle I tilted it the spinner wouldn\u2019t fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy child\u201d the grey haired woman now said to me in a sweet but gravelly voice. \u201cIs that patch the entire sky? Or is it just one area that you are fixated on?\u201d I looked down at her in her sleeping bag and she motioned to the heavens with a 360 degree swoop of her arm. She continuously drew an imaginary circle in the air and pointed to the entire sky in all directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy son\u201d a familiar voice said from behind me. I twirled around and saw the old man in his brown coat from before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m a daughter not a son!\u201d I said but he shook his head and motioned to the heavens with one arm in the same 360 degree swoop that the woman had done just before him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat do you mean by your helicopter arms!?\u201d I cried out. \u201cBoth of you!? I need to get to the city! I need to go to work! Tell me what you mean!\u201d But the grey haired lady and the old man continued to motion at the sky with their slowly revolving arms. Compelled, I looked down at the spinner and then held it high above me once more. This time though I held it against all parts of the sky, not just the patch above the city. After searching for a few moments I stopped and inhaled sharply. I felt tingles course throughout my body. The fidget spinner\u2019s three bulbs inserted perfectly against the juts of a large cloud formation and perfectly replaced the empty blue sky in between. It was as though I held a fabled puzzle piece and fitted it perfectly against the domed blue and white expanse above me. Tracing down to the horizon I saw that the spinner was directly above where I had just come from. My suburb, my house, my home. The breeze blew hard against my back now. A tail wind. And the prongs of the spinner began to move. I looked at the lady and the man and they were both nodding now. I looked back at the spinner and saw it trembling to be touched, to be caressed, to finally be spun into action. \u2018This is it\u2019, I thought. \u2018This is it Erica. Spin now or forever hold your peace!\u2019 I shot my free arm into the air then threw my finger down hard onto the left most prong of the spinner and hit it as forcefully as I could. In an instant the spinner was a whirring propeller and the clouds above my house whipped around in the sky like, a white, grey and blue tornado. The wind around me, the lady, and the old man desperately clawed at our clothes and lashed our hair. An exhilaration and deep longing to be back at home arose within me, a longing to do what I wanted, a longing to be free. I looked down at my corporate skirt flapping in the frantic wind, and then to the lady and the old man who were nodding at me still. The spinner slowed to a stop and wind died down too. The vortex of clouds above my house returned to their normal cloud positions. Suddenly, as though their duties were fulfilled, the old man walked on and the lady lay her head back down and went to sleep. I was now left alone to work out the puzzle of my own life. I rotated my body back to face the city and felt the same dissonance as before. And then I rotated to face my home. The breeze pushed at my back, I felt the spinner start to spin once again and I felt myself suddenly walking back to where I had left only a few minutes ago. Or was I walking back to years ago when I was a teenager? Or was it even further back when I was a child with grand ideas that rotated freely in my mind, unhindered and completely fluid? I don\u2019t know why I walked away from the city, away from my work, but I did. And I looked down and wondered at how such a childish spinning toy could change the direction of my life. How such a cheap, pointless, and trivial thing could rotate itself and then rotate my soul. Grateful, I gave it another spin and saw it slice through the air. Its prongs didn\u2019t care about the direction they were going, didn\u2019t care that they would eventually go back to the same place they started, didn\u2019t care about anything at all except the spin, the flow, the effortless dance in the air. As I walked back home I watched the magic of this spinner closely and felt something start to move within me too. Something small but something gradually gaining momentum. Something spinning around a central core and that core was me. The windmill of my life starting up again, slowly creaking awake. Propelled forward by the breeze at my back I walked home, feeling at one with the motion of the rotating world, feeling contiguous with the motion of my life, feeling a freely spinning joy within me pushing me forward to something greater if I would just let it take me there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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