Some people figure everything is full of spirits. The more I think about it, the more I think they just happen to carry the metaphor for something we all do. If you always bump your elbow on a particular innocent-looking doorframe, you could take the animist perspective and satisfy the spirit of the doorway. If you’re more practical, you could measure the doorway and its approaches,compare it with others, and figure out what to change. If you’re a dancer, actor, or athlete, you might go though it slowly and carefully to find the motions that make you collide. If you’re into introspecive psychology, you could take the chance to examine your attitudes toward entries and what this particular doorway suggests to you that you have to confront. If you dig feng-shui, you’ll map out the ley-lines and so forth leading to this discharge of disharmonious energies. Et cetera.

When something bothers you, you have a way of looking at it carefully. The more quickly you use your way (ways, really) instead of just swearing at the doorframe each time, the healthier you’ll be. It’s not just things that annoy you — it applies to anything that catches your attention. Everyone is always under a hot avalanche of sensation and perception and memory, and to understand and react to it, they let a few microcode handlers deflect the mass of it. The more engaged you are, the lower your thresholds are and the more information filters through to your self and the more sophisticated your world-models become. The less you operate on mental reflexes and the broader and more precise your deliberate habits are, and the better you are at learning new ones and switching between them, the better off you are.

My favorite way of dealing with doorframes and so on is by writing. To me it seems like the Best Way because it’s the most general, but of course everyone will defend another way as they best by way of its helping people or being the truth or not being constrained by notions of Way. I like mine for being the Way of Ways, for being expression instead of action, or — well, see, writing is an action, especially as it takes an action to cause an action, but it’s an extreme case in either direction, because you can do it very much in secret and still derive personal benefit from it, or spread it and therefore its effects more widely and directly than anything else. It’s given to weakness and self-satifaction, but hey. All in all, I dig prose as a medium: I tend to face things like bruising doorframes and lovely evenings with it.

Hey, I didn’t use meta-medium even once!