Ben McKeown

If you know me, you’re familiar with my propensity to speak and write with verbosity.  It is true, I write poetry.  There are times when I speak slowly and with a lilt (surprisingly, sometimes) more akin to Garrison Keillor than Scott Van Pelt.  Recently, I was told by a special someone that I come across as too “mushy”.  Though I understand it’s a fair assessment, I disagree.

I wanted to share with you an excerpt from a bit of thinking I did on this.  Additionally, my thoughts address the silliness I find in worrying about the implications of “mushiness”, which is at the heart of why most folks (including myself) find mushiness off-putting.  Here you go:

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I decided about two years ago that I was going to live with a vivid appreciation of the present, the now, the facts that actually exist, the truth. For really, the past and the future are mere fabrications of our feeble human brains.

The past is nothing more than a recollection, which, as science shows, is actually a process of mental creation as much as it is of actual retrieval. As such, when we think of the past, we aren’t actually remembering it perfectly. Instead, we are simply creating a personal version of reality that is inherently imperfect.

The future, similarly, is an obvious fabrication of reality. Just as our brains rely on evidence, cues, and instinct to re-create an image of the past, we use the same materials to create an image of the future. And of course, the image we create of the future is in no way immaculate.

Both the past and the present, then, contain no perfect truth. The present, however, does. It is only the present that offers us an accurate, reliable, infallible picture of what actually exists. And worrying about the mental fabrications that surround it is absolutely futile, for this is in essence as useful as worrying about a bad dream.

So for this reason, I take great care to bask in the present. This isn’t to say that I don’t try to be prepared for the future, to be groomed and ready, learned and primed. It simply means that I try to let my emotions live in the reality of now rather than in the speculations of my mind. I try to react to what happens now rather than to what I recall happened in the past or to what I think might happen in the future. When I meet a beautiful girl, the verses and poetry that come to me are not hyperbolic or imprudent, for they are simply a product of my reaction to the now. Thus, they are organic, real, and reliable reflections of the state of my Being at any given moment in time.

Mushiness, to me, implies poetry or floweriness that is intended as a means to an end. If I forced myself to write a poem or a song for you because I wanted it to make you fall for me, that would be mushy. What I do, however, I try hard to do for no purpose other than capturing the truth of Now. So when I tell you you’re beautiful or close my eyes while I play you a piano, it is utterly real. It is true. It is now.

Take it and savor it.

Because really, worrying about what its implications might be is, as I said, futile. My poetry, my truth, it doesn’t even reach the point of being affected by implications. It’s way too raw for that. Way too now.

And it’s this whole philosophy that makes me shudder at the thought of simply “seeing what happens”.

Because of the fact that Now is all that actually exists, it is consequently the only time in which we’re really able to affect things. So when I think of simply sitting back and seeing what comes without applying some kind of affect to it all, it seems depressing. If I do this, I effectively sit out reality. And I can’t swallow the thought of simply being an observer of my own life. I need to be an affecter, a conductor, a doer in my own existence. I, as I say often, like to make to shit happen.

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Keep in touch, y’all.

Best to you.