Travelling the Extremes | Pt. 1 - The Near-Psychedelic Qualities of Physical Exhaustion

So these past days marked another tough working phase for me in the matrix and once again I have found how beneficial and rewarding such tremendously demanding stretches can be. Too little sleep, long shifts of hard work in the rain, building up and tearing down stages on a single weekend, loading and unloading trucks full of touring equipment in the middle of the night, hammering metal pins into trusses for the lights that sometimes get stuck, and being on constant availability in case anything unexpected should come up.

Before the first hour it's always kind of a pain - thoughts circle around how long the weekend may be, how little time there will be for anything related to my actual passions and how I will have to reject invitations by good friends who are doing a party at home with live music.

It's tough.

But almost always I find that finally getting to work and starting to get busy on the stage and the to-do's of the day with an awesome crew is totally worth it. Time starts warping, as if going into a flow state almost. It's incredible how "short" 13 hour shifts can be when there are some clear-cut things that need to be done and people on the job who respect each other enough so that a sense of teamwork and accomplishment fills the air as we all get up to speed with the tasks at hand.

But the real reward comes at the end of such a weekend. My body is so freakin' beaten and tired, it's hilarious every time. I quite literally have to laugh how worn I am, how demanding it can be to try and put on my shoes the next morning or get a cup out of the cupboard.

It's this utter sense of being at the end of my bodily capacities for physical work that I feel better than most of the time, and this state has a lot in common with psychedelic states in that the mind runs on minimal energy, meaning there is not much use nor will to overthink things, live in the potential or calculate outcomes.

The state of being tired and overworked on the body seems to shift all the energy reserves left to the maintaining of the body as such, and as a dude who does a lot of mental work (and who has been for the majority of his life) this detour into hard physical work that - at the end of the day puts a big smile on the face of people who enjoyed the concert with their friends - seems really worth it.

Before starting this job I thought it might be a chore often, now I realize it's kind of a vacation every time. A vacation from the mentally dominated existence I have come to get accustomed to over all these years, especially with my lifepath and passions. The tougher the job the more relaxed I feel going home and the more I am looking forward to catching up on sleep and keeping that physically-focussed, non-overthinking mode of existence alive and going as long as I can manage to do so... before the mental work pulls me in again and I don't want to go back to long nights of hammering metal pins and carrying aluminum trusses onto 35 ton trucks.

It's a constant back and forth, up and down and in a few days I will be done working again, getting ready to meet the Psy family in the Netherlands. I really think I secretly dig this jojo-existence quite a lot ;) So in that spirit: Going to bed. I need to catch up on sleep before that rather tough job tomorrow.

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