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. 😀
I’m awake. Rested. Sipping hot coffee. All the usual morning stuff, in the morning. It is a Tuesday. I’ve got an appointment before work, and I’m working very hard at not forgetting that. 🙂 I’ve been trying for awhile to get this appointment, so I definitely do not want to just… forget I have it. (Yeah, that’s a thing. lol) I sip my coffee, meditate, scroll through the news, and consider the day ahead.
Blossoms near a train station. Some other moment of observation and awareness.
When I find my thoughts wandering off, to events and moments that are not “now”, I pull myself back to this present moment with observation of some detail here, now. My breath. This cup of coffee, and the mug warming my hands. The glow of the monitor, illuminating a photograph. The scent of early morning flowers on the pre-dawn breeze filling the apartment through the open patio door. Sounds of my neighbor, through the wall, starting his own morning. Sensations. Awareness. Experience. First person, present tense.
Mmm… this really is a good cup of coffee, this morning. 🙂 I sit quietly, hands wrapped around the warm mug.
Roses don’t mind the rain.
Minutes pass. I am content. Relaxed. Enjoying this particular moment, for no obvious reason besides it being a pleasant one. Isn’t that enough? 🙂 The clock ticks slowly. I sip coffee and listen to the sounds of morning as the sky turns from darkness to a moody gray overcast sky. Rain today? I’m okay with that. I don’t mind the rain.
My mind wanders to daydreams of futures unknown and unknowable. I pull it back to this moment, right here, already rich with potential. My mind wanders to recollections of the past, fraught with inaccuracies and emotional baggage. I pull it back to this moment, and make room for these feelings, and this experience. I sip my coffee, and glance at the time. I remind myself of my appointment, again. I wonder, for a moment, if I ought to drive into the office… and deal with the chaos of downtown driving and parking. I chuckle out loud, facing the obvious; there is no need to drive downtown. Public transit will get me there, just fine. 🙂 Less stress. No parking cost. It seems the smarter choice. I sip my coffee feeling grown-up and practical, capable, and prepared for the day.
I think over my “everyday carry” items, and the day ahead. I make some changes, mentally, trusting myself to make those changes, in fact, before I leave the house for the day. It’s not a given, and I remind myself to double-check the details before I go. Backpack. Keys. Work badges. Card case. Cell phone. The book I’m reading. Some relevant paperwork for this appointment. My vape. Spare batteries for that. There’s a nagging feeling that I’ve forgotten something – but I nearly always feel that way, and the sensation is not reliably associated with an actual experience, so I make the attempt to let that go. I remind myself that my earbuds are laying loose on the seat of the car; I’ve forgotten to grab them several times now, and I’d really like to have them for the train ride.
None of this planning or preparation is the future. It’s all “now”. Maybe it improves the future in some way, maybe it does not. It’s easy to conflate the planning and preparation with the future moments themselves. They are not really related in such a direct way. I take a deep breath. I let it out. I notice that I feel sleepy, or fatigued, or… distant. I feel as if I am avoiding the moment, just ahead, when I step out the door, into a new day. Suddenly, I’d rather go back to bed. Inconvenient. There are things to do. I shake off the sensation, and finish off my coffee.
It’s time to begin again. 🙂
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.
I’m sipping my coffee, before dawn, on a Spring morning. Well-past Winter, and headed for Summer, the morning is mild, and the patio door is open to the cool morning air. I haven’t written a word in days… unless a letter to my Mother, for Mother’s Day, counts. I suppose it does… but…
…I’ve spent lovely hours in the garden…
…I seem to have broken my writing habit. lol Yep. It’s entirely possible to break a habit, however long-standing, however well-favored, and even when that habit is relied upon, enjoyed, and cultivated until it becomes a plot point in one’s life, and an element of character. Still breakable.
Just stop doing it.
Stop a habitual behavior one time, and it has little impact. Stop it again, and it becomes a repeated behavior. Continue stopping it ( as in, don’t do it) and, over time, it becomes part of who you are that you don’t do this thing. We become what we practice, it is that simple.
This is a technique, a practice, that works. It works very well; practice something long enough and changes occur. Practice a desirable behavior. Practice something tedious. Practice something useful. Practice something foolish. We become what we practice.
I broke my writing habit by taking a day from writing, now and then, which grew to amused tolerance of not writing, even for a couple days, which slowly became a small kernel of doubt; do I even want to write? I took a vacation for a few days, to focus on Love, and found myself just… not writing. At all. Good times. Challenges. Adventure. Drama. Practice? Well, one thing I was not practicing? Writing. It’s been interesting to live life without it.
The last day or two I have tended to be somewhat irritable, and easily hurt. At that same time, there’s been something “a bit off” every now and then, between my Traveling Partner and I, in spite of how delightfully well we get along, and how much love exists in this relationship. It struck me as I fell asleep last night that, in some small way, my writing is not only part of who I am… it is part of who we are. When I don’t write, not only do I lose “my mirror”, and regular moment taken for self-reflection, and reinforcement of those practices that tend to make me more the woman I most want to be… it also removes a handy window into who I am, and how I’m doing, that my Traveling Partner is quite used to having available. I wonder if that’s something he counts on? I remind myself to ask, some other time.
This is not to say I sense any obligation among all these words; my choices are my own. I miss writing every day. There is a longing that exists alongside the tempting freedom from this habit of sitting down each morning, over my coffee, reflecting on my thoughts, my actions, my experience… and frankly the longing won. 🙂 That’s okay, too.
I listen to a little bird outside my window, and my neighbor’s car warming up in the driveway. I sip my coffee, and feel the cool morning air fill the house. I think of the happy happenstance of running into a former coworker (current friend) yesterday, that I hadn’t seen in a while. I exist in this vaguely merry pre-dawn state, drinking coffee. I love this “place”, this particular moment and state of being. How is it that even this habit is so easily broken? How is it so easily resumed?
Imagine the insane power our freedom of choice actually implies – and what it says, really, about who we each are (and who we are choosing to be). Raw power.
…And…yeah… it means that it matters who we each choose to be, and that who we are is a product of a great many choices we willfully make, each day. We can choose differently, and better, than we often do – and once we notice that? We sort of have an obligation to ourselves – to that person we most want to be – to step up, and walk a path we choose with care, and make those choices that make us more fully who we do want to be, until, over time, that’s who we actually are.
…So… There’s that. I check the time, and begin again. 🙂
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