Over break, as I’ve reunited with lots of old friends and familiar faces, there’s been a trend as far as how we all see thanksgiving break. It’s not a break, it’s five days to try and catch up with everything back in college in terms of work. That’s exactly what’s happened since I’ve been back home. But even in doing work, it feels costive, constipated. It’s making time here at home feel slow moving, but then it will be over before I know, and the progress I’ve made in the work I have to get done may be costive as well.
Now when people think of constipated, they probably think of how hard it is to go number two in the bathroom. But what I think of now is the word “costive”, and how Everett has used it in both Frenzy and his poem Zulus. In Frenzy, Dionysus uses the word to describe his father, while in Zulus it is used to describe the evolution. “C is for costive, because that is what evolution is”, which in my eyes is true in every sense. Whether it is scientific or in regards to humanity itself, evolution or real change does not happen over night. It is slow, constipated. It is costive.
Ever since the beginning of the semester, I’ve felt this word has applied to my work. Everything I’ve tried to do has felt costive, and a lot of that simply has to do with how I have managed my time. But perhaps ever so often, everyone experiences this. Maybe it is true in saying that evolution, that growth, is costive. Things move slow, and life feels costive, which is okay so long as you learn from it. Learn to make everything stop being so costive, and just start doing, just as I have been trying to learn.