Reporting live from the eye of a phase
Few thoughts on epochs
It is summer. I am languid, I am buoyant. I am often sticky. I am back-floating in sunwarmed ponds and giving due regard to clouds and napping wantonly by rainstorm. I am stripping butt-naked in beach parking lots with gratifying regularity.1
I am steeping in geosmin, SPF 30, and sea. I am not reliably responding to any form of correspondence. I am not brushing my hair.
I am in a “phase.”
If I may posit humbly, I humbly posit that you can often know you’re in a phase while you’re in it, always know you were in a phase after you’re out of it, and rarely, but not never, know you’re about to enter a phase.2 Sometimes, as a friend pointed out, you don’t think a phase is a phase until you realize… it is. It was.
I suppose I saw this hands-off-the-wheel phase coming. In the summer it’s either too hot or too wonderful out to think, plan, strive, do. Since the dawn of time (probably), changes in weather have magnetized deviations in mood, conduct, and grooming. (Not to mention moral values, apparently.)
The Fugees put it nicely: “Seasons change, mad things rearrange.”
But aside from meteorological forces, what exactly causes life “phases?” How do they form, why must they fade? (An aspect of my current phase is an ambling mind... and a surplus of free time.)
If you broke down the process like it’s mitosis it might look something like this:
An event or experience → spurs an action or idea → that stiffens into a short-term habit or routine → that terminates due to a superseding event or experience—and so on and so on.
Typing it out now, it kind of sounds like… existing. It took me quite a while to articulate Existence. Dare say it should!
Back to my scientific breakdown. Por ejemplo: You could see a guy in a movie eating Malt-O-Meal3 and think, “I forgot about Malt-O-Meal. I love Malt-O-Meal” and justlikethat you stumble into a Malt-O-Meal phase.
Which lasts until… when? Until you start dating someone gluten-avoidant? Until Russia backs out of a Black Sea deal and grain prices rise, making hot cereal a luxury commodity you can simply no longer justify? Until pantry moths invade and defile your M.O.M.? (😏) Until one day you just… stop eating Malt-O-Meal?
“Just because” is a canon and sensible reason to begin or end anything.
Phases are two seemingly contradictory things at once: fickle and potentially life-altering. They are just as likely to develop on a whim or out of a tectonic devastation. One can be, and often is, in the throes of multiple at once; they accumulate and layer. We are all phasic baklava, basically.
Phases, well, phase in and phase out. They seem to spark and extinguish soundlessly, but if you could mark the exact moment you move from one phase to another, you could. And isn’t that just fascinating and faintly devastating? Isn’t everything.
Add up your phases and get your life. (Or divide your life into phases.) Taylor Swift—and now everyone under 30—calls them eras.
What’s delightful about phases is the innumerable and insane range of possible subject matters, to say nothing of the correspondingly drastic implications for intensity, length, and irreversible repercussions.
One could have a nihilism phase or a Poptart phase. A celibate phase or a Columbo phase. A high-fiving phase, a pathological lying phase, a mouthwash phase, a MURDERING phase…
(One could also not be so nauseatingly mutable and exist serene and steady as a bivalve. Some are more phase-prone than others. I am a Class A phase-o-holic.)
Unpleasant phases tend to be—understandably—involuntary (hoarding, self-doubt). Many entail hair (bangs, goatees). Who can say never-have-I-ever had a gruesome fashion phase? No one. I had a tunic phase inspired by Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears, although I stand by that. My little brother had a neon skinny jeans phase inspired by middle school senility.
The Internet has dubbed temporary food infatuations (dietary phases) “hyperfixation meals.” My eating habits are maybe unduly influenced by who I’m dating and what I’m reading. When I read Anne of Green Gables in fifth grade, I ate nothing but French bread with raspberry jam. When I read Notes from Underground freshman year of college, I ate nothing.
🚨 Inane theory alert 🚨 I have no evidence for this, but the amount of time it takes to complete a box of cereal may be the universal mean duration of a phase. That just sounds like something that would turn out to be true.
No matter how mundane or magnitudinous4 the focus, to be in a phase is to exist in a new way, for a limited time. Funny that we’re just constantly doing that.
The thing that impresses me, the thing that—as Phil Roth put it—rocks me a little (sometimes a lot), is how multiple phases can—and so often do—clump together to form a bigger, harmonious epoch. Sporadic and disparate incidents fuse with thematic resonance; unrelated events somehow ”hang” as a unit. Chunks of time take on an aura, become an Era. The individual elements occur organically, yet converge profoundly. How! Why!
Sometimes it feels like someone’s dragging experiences into a folder with a cursor, blithely organizing The Desktop Of Our Lives…
Or to indulge in a second helping of metaphor, sometimes it feels like the principle of impressionism at play in the everyday. An inch from our face, all we see are green streaks, blue smears, a pink blotch. But take three steps back and—waterlilies.
Not sure I’m making sense. Not sure I mind. I plan to ~expound in a forthcoming schlog (excitement appreciated though not necessarily advised), but lately tasks like “being coherent” feel tangential to pursuits of real consequence, like eating a just-picked peach with flesh the same temperature as the day, rescuing delphinium from bindweed, watching chickens like it’s TV, swimming. (Swimming trumps every endeavor.)
Intentional carelessness is the defining trait of my summer state. I am… unfazed.
Besides, this August air is already laced with autumn. Fall looms. I’m backstroking in a sea of indolence while I can. I’m repairing threadbare swaths of my psyche with certain hues of bluesky.
Wetsuit changes ;)
This in the case of willfully re-entering a phase, e.g. “I know exactly where this situationship is going. Off I go!” or preternatural intuition, e.g. “I just have a feeling I’m about to pop off.”
I used to drive by the Malt-O-Meal factory approximately once every six years in Minnesota. You never see that place coming until it’s out your window.
🚨 Fifty-cent word alert 🚨