It’s Wednesday already?!?
Jeezum Cronies! The evil architects of daylight savings time really gave me the business this week, hell, I still haven’t found all the clocks I need to change. Anyway, just want to do a mid-week check-in and offload some random brain baggage you may get some value out of, if only a grin.
Living in the present moment
Just listened to Christina Pazsitzky’s That’s Deep Bro podcast and she touched on how difficult it can be to be present minded, with the cauldron of emotions, memories and stimulus we’re buffeted by. And she ain’t whistling dixie, it is a discipline to live in the moment, not a one-time choice. I had a violently clear example of that this morning – one of my huge mental hobgoblins is my tendency when some part of a plan goes awry to immediately assume all parts of the plan are hosed. An example being “I plan to wake at 3:30, write till 5:20, workout till 6:40”, now if say, I forget to set the alarm (or simply turn off the alarm – hard to tell in retrospect) and I wake at 5:00 I may “hypothetically” decide the only course of action is to watch dvr’d “Better Call Saul” episodes till 7:00. This catastrophic thinking is all past/future based, if I’m living in the present moment I’d either write or go work out, because any part of the plan that there’s still time for is still worth doing. I mention this (besides simply reminding myself not to replay these silly patterns) because often when present mindedness is spoken of it’s as a macro-statement (I must live a present minded life). And I find it tends to be more of a minute-to-minute decision, getting in the habit of taking action (present minded) any time you find yourself thinking about taking action (future minded) you can, bit-by-bit live more in the present moment. End of sermon!
Blind Spots
I bought a mattress recently (straight up the best decision I’ve made in years), and while preparing for the exchange of old for new, I started noticing things on the guest side of the bed. Things like an old boombox which has sequentially lost much of its function over the years and hasn’t been touched for over a year. I “see” it every day, but there’s not corresponding cognition that it’s something that needs to be dealt with. So, it went into the trash. While making that command decision, I notice that there is some crazy dust build up behind the nightstand (and up the wall). So I clean that up. Then I notice the baseboards look like they’re made out of caterpillars, so I sweep those off. This cleaning connect-the-dots game went on for about an hour, but I’m not writing about having a clean room. No, I’m just calling attention to the fact that blind spots occur all through our lives. Is our relationship crumbling? Is our body falling apart? Are our lives sad phantoms of what we had dreamed? Big or small, getting in the habit of looking for blind spots and (if its something important, dust bunnies are for illustration purposes only) being ruthless and ego-less in addressing them not only gives you a lifetime of things to do, but will make you a lot happier in the process.
Last Night’s Dream
“It’s not my moonlight tonight.”
I’m in my office, it’s a sexy futuristic place, I’m talking to the salesman about how all the monthly reports need to tell a story to keep the customer engaged.
A happy hour of sorts breaks out and I’m talking with a group of about six young staff, they slowly scatter leaving me with one quirky attractive young woman in her early thirties.
I’m oblivious to her attraction (perhaps I’m making the assumption she wouldn’t find me attractive due to our difference in age) and begrudgingly she gets up and leaves with a couple of girls who ask her if she wants to join them, they’re going to a bar to continue the party. At the glass doors of the office, the girl is holding them open, she says under her breath so that only I can hear “No, it’s not my moonlight tonight” and she comes back toward me.
I ask her what she meant, she cradles my face in her hands and says “You really don’t know what that means do you?” and leaves.
Too late I “get it”, and search for her in the darkened halls of the office, gone. A sense of melancholy, of missed opportunity I haven’t felt in a long time seeps over me.
I run into her later, but she’s taken up with a young man from the office who wasn’t so slow on the uptake. At the bar, the three of us party, though I’m clearly the third wheel. Somehow, the young man and I wind up (shirtless) on the the crowded balcony overlooking the city. I sit, with my shirt and jacket in my lap – there’s a business power-woman across from me, she says “too bad about the jacket” (it has some pilling on the back, which seems to be the reason I’ve taken both it and my shirt off) I say it’s not a problem, I see to it I’m only seen from the front, which makes her laugh.
I’m slowly aware that the six or so people around her are all her assistants, a fact called to my attention by how they almost kill each other to get her a coffee.
Here’s where the mists part, I wake up, and I wonder if it’ll be my moonlight tonight.