Take this one moment – or any, really – and make a point to savor it. Enjoy it. Appreciate it for what it is. Notice how fleeting moments can be…
…Take a deep breath. Pause. Fill your senses…
…Now? Begin again. All over again. It’s a whole new moment. 😀
Yesterday, along with my morning coffee and some hang out time with my Traveling Partner, I was relaxing and found myself appreciating how easy life feels, and how far I’ve come… Lovely feelings for what they are, but of course, these too are transitory parts of the experience of life. Later in the day, I got a healthy reminder; the damage has been done.
Sometimes it’s sunny in the garden of my heart, sometimes it rains. Roses can bloom, rain or shine.
No kidding. It’s possibly not about where I am in life now (rarely is, really), and when I find myself faced with a moment of struggle, a challenge, a bit of emotional bad weather, I sometime forget in that moment, that a lot of this chaos and damage was built so long ago that the “schematics have been lost”. I don’t easily understand why, sometimes, old hurts surface, or why shitty programming is still a thing, ever. It is what it is. I don’t lay down and die over it – that seems excessive. Still. I have moments when I feel hurt, or confused, or struggle with learned helplessness in a great relationship – over shit that damaged me decades ago, in shitty relationships. That’s just real.
…Some of the damage we sustain in the course of a lifetime is quite permanent. I know, I know, hardly the usual message of positivity, but hear me out here; that’s still okay. We become what we practice. It’s nearly always improvable. It’s not that I can’t heal – I know incremental improvement takes time. When I’m feeling really fine, and quite excellent, comfortable in my skin – and in my relationships – that is 100% when I am least watchful for life’s next lesson. There definitely is always a next lesson. lol
An otherwise lovely moment went sideways for me in a moment of learned helplessness colliding with my brain injury. I dithered. I stalled. I literally could not act upon an otherwise routine bit of circumstance. Embarrassing and a tad scary for me. Frustrating and probably hurtful for my Traveling Partner, taken by surprise by my absolute failure to “use my words” or affirmatively respond to this particular situation in any effective way. We let it go, with effort, both realizing it likely wasn’t something I could have done anything about, just then. It felt exceedingly awkward. The rest of the evening passed, for me, somewhat laboriously; I felt self-conscious, raw, insecure, and that I had failed to successfully adult in any legitimate way.
This morning, I let it go, again. It’s a new day. An entirely fresh start. A new beginning. That really matters this morning. I grab that opportunity with both hands, and hold on, then laugh at myself… because this, too, will pass. lol I sip my coffee, breathe deeply, and practice non-attachment, however unskillfully… lots of things take practice. 🙂
An ordinary enough Spring morning. I’m sipping coffee. Minutes are ticking by. The cool dawn air fills the apartment. My fingers click rhythmically on the keyboard. Traffic swooshes by, beyond the driveway. I am considering the “blank page” in front of me – both actually, on this monitor, and metaphorically, this day ahead of me.
Ask the questions. Do the verbs.
Yesterday’s work day was productive, and felt… short. Very short. The evening that followed was delightful, connected, and relaxed. I slept well. I woke easily, just minutes ahead of the alarm clock, feeling rested. This cup of coffee tastes delicious. My clothes feel quite comfortable. Given this context, the fact that I feel content, merry, and relaxed, this morning, is no particular surprise, right?
This gets me thinking about context, generally. When I find myself feeling miserable for one reason (or many), it changes my outlook on everything that touches my experience. I tend to take more things personally when I am in pain, for example, even though there’s no direct connection between the physical experience of pain, and other qualities of other experiences. It colors my mood, and thus, colors my perception of my experience. If my mood, itself, can alter the way I see my experience, and if the experiences I have in life have the potential to alter my mood… is this a trap – or an opportunity? I used to feel it was a sort of sick joke, and emotional Catch-22 wherein, no matter what, the outcome was always that life sucked. One way or another, I was back to misery, pretty inevitably.
Mindfulness practices, and specifically meditation, unraveled that “trap” – turns out I set that trap myself, and caught myself regularly, fair and square. lol I did most of that to me. I mean, sure, I learned all of it somewhere, but that is so much less significant (for me) than the idea that I built that trap, maintained it with great care (and many verbs), and resisted treated myself any better for a long time with the sort of will and commitment that one generally sees from the eager or ambitious. Sort of scary, looking back, how very skillfully done all that was, and how ferociously I protected myself from any sort of healing progress, for so long. Choices.
Context matters. Where am I right now? Am I okay, right now? How do I feel? Pulling my awareness to this present moment, again and again, and allowing the bullshit narratives to fall away until I am only this human being, breathing in this moment, uncomplicated by assumptions, expectations, and clinging to what is not, there is so much less misery in my experience. This helps me sort out random frustrations, hurt feelings, poorly managed fury, dark days, weird sorrows – nearly all that mess is just made up bullshit, and I can choose differently. It’s often about context. The assumptions I make about this or that detail (or person) really fill it out and make it seem so real. It generally isn’t. I giggle, imagining a world in which everyone around us was truly the embodiment of my assumptions, my thoughts about them, instead of being who and what they actually are.
When I allow others around me to be who they are, without my assumptions and expectations clinging to me, them, or the connection we share, I can also relax and let go of any ludicrous notion about changing them, or fixing them, and just enjoy (or not) who they are, themselves. I can be who I am, too. We can share that time together authentically, and maybe even learn things from each other, and grow. If I’m clinging to a golem built of my assumptions and suppositions about them, filtered through my experience of life and projected onto them, we aren’t even really together, are we? I’m just hanging out with a different version of myself. lol It’s also much easier to be open to people, letting them be them, staying firmly “me”, myself… fewer verbs needed to be real, than to shore up an image.
Context… and authenticity. Perspective. Consideration. Awareness. Presence. All good words for a Tuesday… I think I’ll go out there into the world, with a handful of words, and a gentle heart. It’s a good beginning. 🙂
I am thinking about change, this morning. This has been a year filled with change. Some of it has been small stuff of little consequence, some of it has been major change of the sort that feels as if “nothing will ever be the same”. Change is. Resisting change has little chance of success, generally speaking. Embracing change is no easier, sometimes requiring a huge commitment to non-attachment on this whole other level that doesn’t ever seem to get more comfortable. It seems silly when I contemplate how often I fight the smallest changes while being fairly accommodating about the big ones. I sometimes cling to small things that seem peculiarly defining, in some way, of the life I most want to live. An arrangement of paintings. A particular piece of furniture. A color, shape, or particular placement of an object. The world could be descending into chaos, and I’d likely still be fretting about whether too much sunlight falls on a watercolor hanging in a bright location, or whether my favorite rug will look okay with a new couch. lol
It’s all trivial. Almost all of everything, in fact, is both quite trivial, and mostly made up bullshit we carefully craft in our heads. Assumptions. Expectations. Judgments. Things we “know”. We cling ferociously to these, without regard to what is “real”, or what has legitimate value. Our emotions arrive ahead of us to every meeting, every evening at home, and every interaction, whether friendly or contentious. We build all of it up in our thinking as things that matter – events with urgency, and import. We don’t review that too closely, either, and we’ll fight to defend our notions, even in the face of mountains of properly documented actual facts. lol We’re complicated, very fancy, notoriously incorrect, highly reactive primates.
We can do better than we do, often. It’s just so many verbs involved…
I smile to myself quietly. The sun is up. The morning feels cool. My coffee is hot and strangely delicious. I’m still tired, and if I were not distracted by my plans for the day, I’d go back to bed for awhile. Maybe a nap later? Maybe. The day is over-planned. I sip my coffee and wonder briefly how that happened; I’m usually so careful about my plans. I let it go. This, too, is trivial. Really, there’s only “now”, and this cup of coffee, and that’s enough. 🙂
I hear my Traveling Partner cough in the other room. I smile. My favorite distraction. 🙂 It’s time to begin again.
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