THE SPINNERS

  (Or Excitement is Exhaustion)

Enthusiasm...
Stimulation... Ya-hoo!
Exhilaration...  Thrills and Wild times! 
“Whoopie!  Wheeeee! Wudda ride!  Excitement is so much fun!  Anything that makes me feel like spinning!  Whoopy!  Spinning is a gas!” 

That’s what crazy people call happiness. 

You’ve seen the little boy—the one who can’t contain his emotional energy—hollering until he’s hoarse in the throat, spinning wildly in circles until he falls—because he loves the sensation of vertigo.  He likens it to euphoria.  He is obsessed with the sensation of Rush, while mimicking the force and vigor of a plunging waterfall—pushing, and lurching—he charges and pitches—and thrusts himself to be thrown over the edge.  To say the child is happy would be erroneous—happiness would depend on many individual factors in the child and his surroundings. 

But make no doubt about it, that kid’s having a grand ol’ time—everything he does is for the pursuit of Fun, and boy does he have fun! 
He is about as thoughtless as it gets.  He has no consciousness of how he appears, and no awareness, whatsoever, of how others perceive him.  But his blindness to himself and others does not matter to him, because his main journey in life is looking for a rush!

Now imagine a society where a large portion of the adults are just like this little boy.  Many of them are men— but most of them are women—rushing as fast as the waterfall, plunging into the abyss.  They are no different than the child; accept that instead of using their bodies to throw themselves over the cliff—they use their mouths.

It is a phenomenon how many adults are addicted to the sensation of excitement.  In their need to experience a rush, they excite themselves—in the company of others—which is often—by talking louder and faster as the night goes.
The more they interrupt each other—talking faster than the next guy, yelling louder than the next woman—the more excitement they create, and the bigger their rush becomes.  They thrive on it because they perceive it as happiness. 

But what the spinning-wildly-until-we-hit-the-ground really means is that our wiring inside our brains is short-circuiting.

The crazy boy who can’t control his need for thrills is not even in his body—so short-circuited are his brain cells.  His energy level is not only extremely high, but it’s extremely out of focus.  Inside his head, he is truly spinning—it’s as if he is a cyclone inside his own world.
His brain’s wiring—the electrical pathways that give him direction—are either overcharged, or they are touching so closely that they are pinching each other. 

Imagine a huge network of tributaries—rapidly rushing streams, switching back and forth—charging headlong into one another, pushing, cutting each other off, and flooding the valley.

Because the short-circuiting little boy has flooded his valley, his very presence when he is still, is overwhelmed.  His volume of water—or in this case, electricity—is overflowing.  Basically, he is drowning in himself—making it impossible to be calm. 
Then he collapses from exhaustion.  The flood is, simply, too intense to navigate.   

If a calm person mentions to the wound-up person such things like try the decaf, or you ought to try yoga, they become offensive, because they think they are Having Fun.
Well, it’s understandable, when their insides are rushing wildly.  The feeling is like spiritual vertigo, giving the Spinner a touch of euphoria.

But for those who are calm and not short-circuiting, true happiness is the state of Peace.  The sensation is not wild—it is more like a feather floating and dancing on the wind.  Or a bird soaring and dipping, and rising in flight.  A running horse—tail in the air and hooves prancing lightly—has by far more happiness than the loud one who is obsessed with Excitement—hollering loudly over the others, in a crackling voice to be heard.

The poor thing is not happy, at least not in that moment.  What she is is excited.  And since Excitement exhausts, the poor spinner is also exhausted.

I know these things, because I, too, have a short-circuiting brain.  I am a Spinner.  And there is only one safe way to stop the flooding, and the spinning, and the craving for out-of-focus excitement, and that is with Will Power.

Now, as for doing challenging sports and pushing the envelope, and being a brave person who seeks physical thrills, this type of rush is about gaining personal knowledge—it's also about empowerment. 
Empowerment has more happiness, and more substance, than the Spinner craving excitement has, for empowerment brings total peace.  Not exhaustion.