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Finding the Chill

December 2, 2020 //
3

I don’t mean the icy mornings of autumn in my titular reference to “chill” – I mean that fully relaxed state of being in which self-awareness leads observation to a well-spring of contentment in non-attachment to specific outcomes. 🙂 The chill chill. Calm. Still. At ease.

…My coffee is long gone. My most recent break was little more than an excuse to take an Rx pain reliever. Headache. Arthritis. Tennis elbow? (Well, or something unreasonably similar.) The afternoon sunshine sneaks into the studio on an angle, illuminating a tissue box on my desk, beneath and behind my monitor(s), giving it seeming significance of some kind. It has none. It’s a trick of the light. Like this blog post; it has no import, no real gravitas, no significance, just… words. A moment. A break from routine. A few swallows of water, and a mental “reset button” pressed, moving on to another task. I am here, now. I am okay. Nothing to see here. Nothing much to share. Still…

…And I do mean “still”… I think about a friend’s recent observation that she is struggling to “get a minute of peace”. I think about other similar remarks from friends (and readers – I see you!). Me, too. Sometimes busy is far too busy, chaos is too chaotic, and breaks are a challenge to take properly. Have you tried this…? It’s a good starting point on finding that quiet moment, when quiet moments are hard to come by.

…It helps to have a good pair of headphones, too… 🙂

I pause and take my own advice for two minutes. I end up feeling more refreshed than I expect to…but also already looking forward to the end of the actual day, hours from now, when I can flop down onto my bed and just give in to fatigue quite completely. Taking more breaks, more skillfully, would probably really help with the enduring fatigue that has chased me down since daylight savings time ended. Damn I wish we’d get smarter and stop doing that.

…Work interrupts me interrupting work to grab a break. Yeah… this is more complicated than it looks, sometimes. I breathe. Exhale. Relax. I push my mind firmly off the work topic, and back to writing for a couple minutes. I know taking proper breaks results in more efficient (and faster, and more skillful) work… so I also find myself, often, wondering where the hell I got the reluctance to do it…? Strange, isn’t it? It’s such an important self-care detail, too. I wonder, also, if this bit of weirdness is cultural (unique to American workers?) or regional, or universal, or… and then I find that I’ve descended into yet another work “rabbit hole” – my field of endeavor being to do with how people work, and how much time things take, and how many people a task or job will require to do well… LOL Fuuuuuuck. This is hard. Clearly I need more practice…

…Only now it’s already time to begin (work) again. 😉

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being

Quiet Moments

December 1, 2020 //
3

I’ve learned to find quiet moments almost anywhere that isn’t ridiculously noisy or busy. Handy. Sometimes I do find that I’ve got to search out that moment of quiet, or build it from unexpected circumstances, but now and then some perfectly lovely moment of quiet just happens to be where I am sitting.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I woke often. I returned to sleep with relative ease, mostly. I never felt wholly awake and alert (which might have made getting up make sense), and I didn’t feel particularly sleepy at the time (even immediately before falling asleep). “Wakeful” night. I seem to have managed to get enough rest, anyway. 🙂

There was this one quiet moment, during the night, that I sat contentedly, relaxing in the dim glow of the Giftmas tree lights, just enjoying that quiet moment. It was lovely. There was no pressure to do more, or do differently. No rush. No stress. Just quiet time, there in the holiday twilight alone, while my Traveling Partner slept on, in the bedroom. It was precious.

Today is lovely, too. Beautiful moments. A soak in the hot tub on a misty cold autumn morning. A quiet cup of coffee shared with my partner. A spontaneous exchange of yule gifts, because… why not? It was delightful. 🙂 The recollection of it still is.

I sit smiling in this quiet moment, retrieving joyful memories of other quiet moments. Enjoying joy through recalling joyful moments. Easy. (And yes, it’s a practice, and yes, there are verbs involved, and results may vary…but how pleasant to practice it? Why wouldn’t I? 😀 )

Here. Now. This is enough. I fill up on the joy and contentment, smiling. It’s the middle of a work day… time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Art of Being

Buttons and Dials

November 25, 2020 //
0

I am sipping my coffee at leisure; I took today off. I know, sometimes it’s tough to sort out the days during a pandemic, working from home. Some folks may find “taking a day off” sort of pointless under those circumstances… I still find it pretty essential for my quality of life and general enjoyment and self-care. So. A day off? Yes, please.

I’m thinking about how easily loved ones can “push each others buttons”, even without meaning to. I contemplate how much more comfortable human beings often seem to be with being their most vile self in the context of their most favored or intimate relationships. (I still do not get how that makes any sense… why not, instead, be your worst self with absolute strangers, than with people you say you love? Would you not want your loved ones to enjoy the best of who you are?) It often falls to the individual to vigilantly “supervise” their vulnerable “buttons”, and to learn to be less reactive, generally. I’ve certainly found value in that, although my results do vary. “Expectation-setting” and asking any one individual to avoid pushing a given button doesn’t seem very helpful, sometimes (or within some relationships).

I sip my coffee, and my mind wanders on.

I think for a moment about the coffee, itself. A moment of comfort. A metaphor for self-care, for being centered, for self-reflection (at least for me). I so routinely take a moment of ease over a cup of coffee that having a coffee cup in my hand feels “complete” in an odd way. So… what happens when the coffee runs out? What would replace this coffee cup in my hand, if there were literally no coffee (or, at least, none for me)?

My mind wanders on. Payday tasks are handled. There is a secure comfortable feeling that comes with that, these days, especially with the holidays ahead. Another sip of coffee, and my mind moves on…

I hear the soft sound of lo-fi coffee house “radio” from the other room, over the whirr of my computer’s CPU fan. It reaches my consciousness as a sort of “wellness indicator”, telling me it’s a fine morning to enjoy life, just as it is. This prompts me to consider other “indicator dials” and gauges of wellness in my moment-to-moment experience of living life. What other signals do I send myself that “all is well”? Do I recognize conditions on a spectrum, as one might see on a gauge or dial on the dashboard of my car? Do I have an “internal dashboard” that I could quickly glance over in a moment, and correctly evaluate conditions developing in real-time? I mean… that’s sort of what all of consciousness is, more or less, I suppose… if I listen. I like the notion of an internal “wellness dashboard”. Buttons and dials. Better be careful with that. I smile at the thought of it. I have another drink of my coffee.

My mind wanders on. Not a bad start to a long holiday weekend at home with someone I love. Certainly it’s enough. 🙂

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being

Sometimes It’s Hard

November 23, 2020 //
0

I hurt today. Soaking helped some. Medication helped some. Morning yoga helped some. I still hurt. I’m cross, and finding it hard to deal with people gently. Pain is not visible – still complicates my interactions. Everything from a partner’s heartfelt well-intentioned fitness reminders that seem to overlook how much pain I am in to a colleague’s pleasant inquiry whether I am “having a bad day” (nope, just pain) that lacks any context regarding the one thing truly amiss (pain). I am as frustrated with the lack of ability to really drive the message home in a way that sticks with loved ones (it’s almost always just pain) as I am with my lack of ability to do anything substantial to reduce my day-to-day pain in a reliable way. Neither bit of frustration is the slightest help for actually improving anything whatsoever.

I breathe. Exhale. Relax. Let go of the frustration. Let go of being annoyed by the fairly steady lack of any real helpfulness involved in asking me what can be done to help. Let go of being annoyed with being reminded to do things that are good for my physical wellness, but so very difficult to embrace because I just fucking hurt. Let go of the whining about any of it (while I whine about all of it, right here). Just… let it go. Feel the love instead of the futility. It’s a tall fucking ask, I grant you that. One more thing to do, it sometimes seems…and sometimes I just feel so… tired. I take a breath, and let that go, too. Even that. Let it go.

There are tears in my eyes. Less the pain than the frustration with the pain. Sometimes it’s hard. Challenging. “The struggle is real.” I try to stop struggling and just surrender to this moment, here, now. It’s not a bad moment. It’s got some nice points to it. The work day almost over. Nice. Warm cup of noodles next to me waiting for my attention – a satisfying small bite of lunch, once it’s ready. Nice. The rain has paused and it looks like a good day to walk – I even have a purposeful destination in mind that should be within my fitness “reach”. Nice. All of that is good stuff. None of that is specifically about the pain I am in. I sit with that perspective instead, for a while.

…These noodles are ready, and it’s already time to begin again. I put the work in front of me on pause, and take care of this fragile vessel. For now, that’s enough.

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Categories anger, anhedonia, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, Despair, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices

Finding That Place

November 18, 2020 //
0

“I’ll be writing while I wait for the oven to pre-heat,” I said as I walked away, headed toward my studio. “Okay” he replied, already having returned his focus to the task in front of him. I smile, contentedly, figuring whether he actually heard me or not, it was probably enough to say so; he’d walk right past the open door of my studio if he sought some moment of shared time. There I would be. 🙂 It ‘s a strange moment to focus on, I grant you… It’s just, well, it was a strangely specific moment, and a lovely sensation of “being settled in”, and I don’t recall that I’d had it quite so intensely yet, since moving in to the house. I sat down to write, and the feeling lingered, dominating my thoughts.

…And here we are…

One moment of many.

It’s been raining. Still. I’m okay with that. I enjoy the rain. I set out to walk this afternoon, counting on a soft rain. The rain wasn’t going to have any of that – it came down as a drenching downpour instead. Instead of a walk in the rain, I put on my mask and went to the store. Change is.

The oven beeps to alert me it has pre-heated.

I head into the kitchen and get dinner going. I smile rather stupidly the entire time; I feel good. I mean, pain is pain, I deal with it. The rest of the experience is pretty fucking splendid – overlooking physical pain (this quantity, this day, this time) seems achievable. Mostly is. I make note to say something to my Traveling Partner about the lights, when I notice, all over again, how very much I like the new ones he put in, and the way they enhance the “feel” of the room. It’s interesting how much difference “the color” of the light in a room can change the vibe.

I feel the silky smooth surface of the keys of my keyboard. Already, some are more worn than others. The music in the background feels welcoming, and pleasant – “non-invasive” – adding to the sensation of “smoothness” in this moment. The juxtaposition of sensations extends even to my hair, grown long over the pandemic, resting heavily on my shoulders, spilling forward, ends curling across my chest. Soft. I breathe it in, and sit here with it, just… being. It’s enough.

…Change is… soon enough I’ll have to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being
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