Chapter 11 — Rebalancing

Molly went back to work on Monday morning and nothing there had changed in any obvious way, which she noticed straight away because she had half expected the place to feel different after the weekend. Instead, it was the same building with the same lights and the same chitter-chatter of people who were already bracing themselves for the week before the day had properly started. She put her bag down and turned her computer on, but she didn’t sit right away. She stood for a moment with her hand on the desk and looked around as she realised how little she felt the usual inner bubbling to prepare herself for what was coming.

By the time she had her first tea break, a couple of colleagues were talking about deadlines and resourcing around the room.

“The week’s already looking tight,” one of them had said.

She didn’t care to look up and see who it was.

Molly poured water into the kettle and listened without stepping into the current of it the way she normally would have. The conversation changed slightly without stopping but it had lost the type of urgency it usually would have made her feel.

It ebbed.

It wanted to grab her back in and for a moment, she thought it might. It didn’t, though, and, at the first meeting of the day, people sat around the table with laptops open and shoulders forward, but not a single individualised face in sight. She couldn’t wait to get out of there when quitting time came.

Molly opened her laptop later that night because sleep wasn’t coming yet and because writing things down had become a way of letting them go somewhere other than inside her head. She opened her digital journal and thought about Sosta’s family in comparison to her work bunch. She didn’t mean to compare them. It just sort of happened naturally.

She wrote that what kept coming back to her was how often people treated excess like a moral problem when it felt more like a sign that something else was missing. She thought about the weekend and about how no one there talked about restraint or discipline or doing better and how nothing seemed to spiral anyway. She wrote that it made sense once you noticed how much of modern life happened without land, bodies, seasons or anyone else really involved.

We all feel so out of place because we’re detached from the order of things.

If eating isn’t tied to soil or effort or season or even knowing where the food came from, then how would appetite know when to stop? Why would it and why do we act surprised when it keeps going? And why do we talk about willpower like it’s meant to replace relationship? It feels like blaming someone for getting lost after you’ve taken away the map and the signs and then told them they should’ve known better anyway.

Same thing with sex when it’s stripped of presence and reciprocity and risk and being actually seen as a whole human being. Sex isn’t some automatic act, nor is it something that we have to contextualise so damn much. It turns into repetition instead of an encounter and then we call that excess as if desire itself is the problem rather than the absence of anything real to meet it.

If you ask me, drugs make sense in the same way. They used to be rare and held and shared and guided for our betterment. They were gateways to ancestry and to divine and to our inner worlds. Now, they’re everywhere and private and disconnected and we’re shocked when they turn into escape instead of meaning. It’s as if the sanctity of ceremony was just a decoration.

I keep coming back to the language of sin and how wrong it is and how convenient it must’ve been to say the fault lived in the person rather than in the conditions they were surviving inside. If desire is a moral failure, then you don’t have to ask what’s been removed or broken or flattened. You just tell people to manage themselves better and make them feel bad when they can’t. I think Jess lives with all of that shame. It has nowhere to go. He wants everything to be so controlled that there’s hardly any time for us to feel a genuine connection to ourselves or one another.

It’s not his fault. It’s not my fault. None of this lets anyone off the hook and I’m not pretending people don’t make choices, but responsibility looks different once you can see the context clearly, because telling someone to moderate themselves inside a system that rewards speed and accumulation and constant stimulation feels dishonest. You can’t shame your way to balance when everything around you is designed to push you full steam ahead.

Technology fits right into this and I don’t think it’s evil or corrupting in itself. It’s just gone from being an extension of the body to being an environment that shapes attention and identity whether you want it to or not. So, of course disengaging feels hard. Why wouldn’t it? Ingenuity isn’t the problem and it never was. Ancient cultures built extraordinary things and understood cycles and limits at the same time. They didn’t separate progress from consequence. Look at the Egyptians and their pyramids or the Mayans and their agricultural calendars.

Something’s just not right in how far gone we are. I keep circling back to the same thought, which is that excess isn’t the thing that needs fixing, disconnection is, and when the ideology of ‘relationship’ is restored, regulation seems to follow on its own without anyone having to clamp down or moralise. Like Sosta’s family. They just live. Maybe the real question was never how to suppress desire but how to put it back where it belongs. The real sins are:

Food without land. Sex without reciprocity. Drugs without ceremony. Ownership without sufficiency. Power without grounding. Transcendence without reconciliation.

She closed the laptop without rereading any of it and lay back on the bed. She felt like the point wasn’t having an answer but seeing the shape of the question for what it was.