Wump To Live

My band had stopped being a band. They could play. They could not occupy the same minute. After Wumping with Rhythm we sat a rest on purpose, then came back in, and the gym went silent in the way that means two hundred people just became one animal. A freshman in the back row started crying into her clarinet. I have directed for nineteen years. I had forgotten that was available.

After my wife died I became very good at Tuesdays and very poor at being alive. Finding Your First Wump had me walk around the block as if it counted. It counted so hard I had to sit on someone else’s retaining wall. I have since cooked for neighbors, taken a train nowhere, and asked a woman at church if I could sit with her, which I had not done in four years. I am sixty-seven. I thought the window had closed. The wump opened it. I intend to keep it open.

I was sleeping under my desk and calling it ambition. Wump Mechanics made me put recovery on the calendar before the launch. I did not quit my job. I got my evenings back, then my hands, then the person I live with, who had stopped asking how my day was because the answer was always the same weather. I used to optimize until I disappeared. I still have the graphs. They are quieter. I am louder, in the ways that matter.

I was going to leave the floor before it took the last of me. The Micro-Wump Method sounded like a pamphlet until I used it between rooms: one complete breath, one finished sentence to a family, then back. I stayed. More than that — I started coming home as a person my kids could recognize. On a Tuesday in May I caught a bleed because I was actually in the minute, not already in the next one. I keep the book in my locker. I will not be dramatic. It gave me my life and left me a nurse.

I had turned my inner life into content. The Inner Chamber made me keep one true thing for twenty-four hours before I offered it to a room. In that silence I finally called my brother, whom I had not spoken to since the funeral. We sat on a porch and completed something that had been sitting in both of us for three years. I still write copy. I no longer perform my soul for a living. If that is not a wump, I do not know the word.