Just me at 4:45 PM PST and my laptop computer screen in an empty apartment, lounging on the couch, wondering if I have anything illuminating to reveal to myself.
Old Business: I have not watched Oprah.com/anewearth episodes at work at my desk before work, as I plotted to do in my last post. Getting to my desk early enough has proved challenging, not to mention remembering to bring headphones. Nor have I re-instituted regular breaks as I was doing previous to this position. Nevertheless, while still nowhere near sufficiently, I have in the past week taken moments while at work to re-focus on the present moment. And, I realized with increased work hours comes decreased creative time. Thus, Friday night through today I have spent significant periods of time in solitude, and Saturday I bought a graphite pencil and a sketch book, and even did a sketch.
It is my personal makeup that without significant periods of solitude and “involution” time I become bonkers. Stress levels rise, and Presence is reduced to an agenda item on a long list of to-dos. Creative time, meditation, and time in nature all contribute to stability and conscience. I’m sure this is true for everyone to some degree, but for me, it’s crucial or the rest of my life tends to become radically unproductive.
I’ve also been noticing perhaps even more the incessant din in my noggin, particularly when I first wake up. It’s like coming back home to a party that never stopped, and as the minutes tick by, getting more and more wrapped up in the goings on, until I’m a full-fledged participant.
Come to think of it, my meditation teacher says in a CD talk something like, ‘Imagine being at a loud party and the guests just never go home. That’s what it’s like without meditation: the party never stops.’ Exhausting to even ponder. And yet, that’s what life feels like in the absence of Presence. With Presence, the party becomes a non-issue. I’m not reduced to a blathering idiot at the mercy of the outside environment and the inner din. It really is like being held captive…yet, the door is open. I can walk out any time I want to.
Ahhhh: Freddy Krueger. I seem to recall that he couldn’t actually kill you, rather, he was responsible for scaring you into causing your own death out of shear uncontrollable fear. Now that I read the Wikipedia entry for this character, I see that at least in the original movie this element was present: if you weren’t afraid of him, he didn’t have power over you, and at least for the moment would go away.
I think that’s more in line with my relationship to my blathering ego. There are moments I can stand and look at it, rather than being harried by its constant barrage. In fact, it’s when the barrage becomes totally ridiculous that I sometimes get a reality check: “Is this really necessary?” It’s the general white noise that I have a real challenge waking up from: the bulk of my day.
I also stumbled on another delusion the other day. I was driving around with some sense of purpose, like my next decision about whether or not to stop to refill water jugs, or go to the Container Store, or go straight home, had some deeper meaning. It was somewhat startling to realize in a flash that I was looking at the routine events of my day as if they had some cosmic significance, and “I’d better choose wisely, or else,” when in reality, I was deluded. I get caught in this loop, trying to make the “RIGHT” decisions, whether it’s where to go to school or where to sit in a theater or which chocolate truffle to eat. (“But which one is the RIGHT one?!”) As if there’s some cosmic determination as to the “right” and “wrong” chocolate truffle.
Present example: the length of this blog post. I’m noticing my mind agonizing over whether I should have posted it a paragraph or two ago, and started a “November 9, 2008 II” post (for ease of digestibility/readers including me not being daunted by the apparent length of a post and deciding not to read it), or say fuck it and keep typing. “But what is the RIGHT decision?”
It seems to me that this is a function of my ego: wanting to make the RIGHT decision, so as not to screw up and be guilty of failure. (I am not a stranger to the label “perfectionist.”) So, while I can reason myself away from this type of thinking–“It’s not what I do but how I do it,”–I’m suspecting that the consistent preoccupation with “right” is a part of my egoic structure that I can watch with increasingly frequency.
Funny, however, that even as I begin to ponder letting go of the string of this helium balloon that I don’t need anymore, I get a feeling of…of what? Of being the balloon floating out in space, unteathered, lost.
As I conclude my post, I’m checking inside: “What’s going on inside me at this moment?” (Pg. 49 of Practicing the Power of Now) I’m noticing a feeling of “doing,” of “what’s next?,” of residue from reviewing the notes of a scary movie (I’m super susceptible to scary movie things; it’s a Neptunian thing). Some feeling of, “Should I have had that last piece of chocolate? Do I feel a bit queasy? What do I eat now? I feel like calling someone and chatting…getting out of my own head…”
In general, not a feeling of ease. But as I let that be just fine–rather than a judgement–the tension…eases. “I’m not ok, and that’s ok. In fact, that’s just fine.”
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Becoming Present 