Dancing Geek

Today was not such a good day.  I’ve been low all day.  However, I’m determined not to lose all my momentum, so today I let myself do something tiny, something that was so easy it felt like no effort at all, but that still moved me directly toward one of my 3 big goals (yet to be made public).

Then I went and ate yummy food, sat on the floor with a rabbit and read a book.

And somehow, right now, I don’t feel like today has been a total waste.  Which, compared to some days where I’ve pushed and pushed to try and get something ‘big’ done and ended up pootling around and procrastinating till some ungodly hour of the morning, feels like a win.

So yeah, today I gave myself permission to be tiny, so long as I still kept moving forwards, and I feel good about it.

Joely wrote a post about there being no “there” to go to and it got me thinking about where I was going on this (for lack of a better word) journey I’m currently on, that was originally started by a sense that I was in the wrong place.

There is no “there” to get to

The post mentioned (to paraphrase) the idea that being “nearly there” in terms of personal development is an ongoing situation.  That you don’t really ever get “there” because “there” is the make-believe utopian state of perfection that no person will ever reach.

This makes a lot of sense, but only I think after getting to the point where mindfulness has become a habit, at least for me.  I have gone through a series of steps that means I can, with hindsight, see how this has been true for me.  So far it’s been like this:

• At first there is the learnt numbness (for many different reasons; so many of us do learn it however)
• Then there is the dissatisfaction
• Then the decision to find another way (such a big deal at that time – and it is something to celebrate for each person)
• Then the drive to find some big white light
• And then the gradual realisation that it was something very small all along that needed to change

It’s the last part that I think is the realisation that there is no “there” to get to, that we aren’t broken, that we don’t need fixing, that we can accept ourselves as we are now, that we’ll never be finished and have no issues to work on.

This last step is accepting that we simply need to bring mindfulness into everything we do.

It’s almost disappointing

It’s such a small thing and yet it’s affect is so very profound.  Only when you’ve had time to see the massive impact that it’s had, to not just learn that mindfulness will do this and intellectually understand the principle, but to have actually experienced the massive changes that come about from being mindful, only then does it not seem like the tiniest thing.

So to get to that last step we* have to build up the change into something massive in our heads.  We have to feel that there’s something massively wrong with the way we are at first, we have to break through the inertia of living unaware, and it’s so hard to take that first step that we need an image of some amazing revelation, some bright white light, to get us going and keep us going through the difficulty that follows.

Unless we almost trick ourselves into trying out mindfulness in various different forms (possibly along with lots of other gimmicks) we can get stuck searching and researching for the grand unified theory of life without actually making the final realisation.

*We = people like me, not everyone

It’s rocking my world

For me, right now, this realisation is thoroughly profound.  I’m starting to see how chas can write that we should “revel in it“, it being the fact that we make up life as we go along, make mistakes and keep going anyway.

In fact, I was drafting a comment to respond and started writing things like “I’m not quite there, I don’t think” and “I’m still just not quite there yet.  Even if there’s no there to get to!”  Writing this post however has given me the perspective to see that I am there!  That this was just my “Tell myself I’m not ready so I don’t have to do the big scary thing of being out there in the world” pattern showing up again.

A perfect quote

I’m not a big fan of the ‘stick a quote under a title to make it look fancy’ way of writing, but for me, sometimes, a good quote is able to represent the meaning of a big jumble of thoughts.  It’s not really even a quote since I’m not sure if Byron Katie actually said these words, but it’s something I’ve written down, inspired by her work, and it sums up all of this for me quite nicely.

I’m doing the right thing, I just need to be thinking something different.

I wound up thinking about time yesterday (or rather this morning, but then with timezones and everything all those labels are arbitrary anyway).

So as I went to bed I made the intention that when I got up I would do nothing until I had done nothing.  That is, I would refrain from doing tasks and busywork until I had spent some time being still, whether in full meditation or journaling or whatever.

When I got up I managed to somehow remember this, grabbed a glass of orange juice to warm up the body functions, and found a quiet place to just be for a while.  I started by bouncing on my fitball, because it’s an excellent way to wake up the bodymind at any time of day, and after a few minutes of that (it is absolutely glorious to allow yourself that amount of time) I put on some calming music (3 hours worth roughly – I was giving myself plenty of time here) sat down, got comfy, made sure I’d be warm, and closed my eyes.

The noise that came up first of all needed to be dealt with, so I used my favourite technique of writing out the key phrases that needed to be acknowledged (stuff like worries about paying in USD via paypal to someone in the UK, an idea for my 12seconds video of the day, what I should do about a situation that’s been bugging me).

The bit I now get about meditation

A lot of what I had picked up about meditation (you know, the same way you learn about things like the stock market, the country of Iraq, and the idea that pig and pork are different words because of the Norman conquest – i.e. by hearsay) involved the idea that one aimed for a blank mind, letting go of thoughts that came through.  However, in my personal opinion, a much better approach is to bring awareness to the thoughts that are going through your mind.

A blank mind is like the uber-advanced level, but for anyone without years of experience and/or training then bringing your awareness to the thoughts you think will get you to a calm and quiet place eventually.  Which is where the writing it out part helps.

So whilst I had an intention to think about my relationship with time, I would only consciously think about this when there were no other thoughts whizzing through my brain.  During the beginning (I’m not sure how long) I would suddenly realise that I had gone off on a tangent and just try and bring my awareness to the thoughts I was having.  Noticing them, and seeing if they had anything interesting or helpful to tell me.  If they did, I would note this down and then go back to sitting.

The act of breaking away to note down the helpful part may actually be helping me reset to a calm state again, though I don’t know for sure, but usually this process means that that particular thought has moved on, and even seeing if it wants to come back will not result in the tangent getting picked up again – it has played out.  Rinse and repeat and quite quickly (there were only 6 off topic distractions) I’m free to explore the topic I want to meditate on without fighting myself over it.

Exploring what time is

As I thought about how I relate to time I had a few realisations, some of them personal, some of them perhaps useful to you.  So I’ll share them here for you to see if any are helpful:

• If I’m up late I can simply bring awareness to the situation.  Is it something I need right now, or is it just falling into a habit?
• I am often in denial about time passing.  I often resist its flow forwards.  I often seek to control it.
• I curl up time in on itself, into a dense tangled knot that stays in a small transparent sphere.
• I think I do this to avoid having to choose.
• I may have to mourn time I have lost in order to untangle this knot and accept reality as it is.
• By keeping time tangled up in a dense knot I can believe that my time (the time in the sphere) is infinite.
• Infinite time means that there is no urgency and so no motivation to go towards my fear.
• Infinite time is the same as no time at all, in that whatever discrete actions we take can be seen as happening all at the same time (given the appropriate scale). <–This one is a toughy to get your head around.
• If there is no sense of one thing happening before another then there is not value in paying attention to priorities.  E.g. in infinite time it will all happen at some point.
• Finite time fixes the scale at which we operate, giving a sense of urgency and a value to the order of actions.
• If I embrace my finite time (i.e. accept reality) I must embrace the fact that I will die.
• To not be distracted by my death I would need to make peace with it.
• In the meantime, which may last my whole life, I can give myself permission to be distracted and bring awareness to it whenever I remember.
• I may panic about not having enough time when I acknowledge what I want to achieve and the priority order of actions.
• I can sooth this panic by reminding myself that something is better than nothing; unfinished is better than not started; incomplete, cut short or put away is better than ignored.

Which leads me to my next question

If I decide to be mindful of time, using my thoughts above to help me remain so, then what do I want to do with my time?

Oh yes, we’re back to ‘what do you want?’ folks.

My stock answer (thanks to Charlie’s awesome comment) is: To flourish or to self actualise (pick whichever one doesn’t make you gag).

[Aside: It strikes me that I'm giving a lot of blog love to Charlie at the moment - I hope no one else feels left out - I love you all!]

Another way of phrasing it (because some words make people go ‘ack!’ and because a different word can offer a powerfully different perspective) is to fulfil my potential.

However, it may very well be impossible to fulfil all of my potential in a finite amount of time.  The same goes for anyone else, but this blog is about me.

Which some people never forget, but others of us do.  (It’s the oddest thing I’ve started to notice.  If we could remember all the stuff we knew we’d live in a utopia. Which makes me think that if we could exist outside of time, and therefore live all times at once, and so not be able to forget something that we knew at one point in our lives, then we’d basically be like perfect, boring beings.  Which can be a way of rationalising the motives behind the belief that we are spritual beings that put a part of ourselves into mortal bodies in order to travel through time in a linear fashion – almost like a test: how much can we remember? But I digress completely, if somewhat interestingly.)

This question starts to get circular here, is what I was trying to say.  What do I want? I want to flourish? What do I want to flourish at? Well, what do I want? Repeat ad nauseum.

The answer to what I want is not to be found in my thinking.  It is to be found in my heart (metaphorically speaking).

On a related note, but optional for skim readers, is the idea that I might want to serve others.  Which I do.  However, I’m starting to understand/believe (depending on your point of view) that I am not able to know ahead of time what value others will derive from what I do.  Therefore I am not able to wisely choose based on my perceived value of my actions.  I am left again looking at the question ‘What do I want to do?’ to be my guide.

So what now?

Oh hurrah, we’re nearly at the end of the post when this one shows up.

Two things:

• Mindfulness of time
• Mindfulness of heart

With regards the first I’m going to start recording how I spend my time and see if that doesn’t a) make an automatic difference because I instantly pay more attention and b) show up any patterns that are helping or getting in the way.

The second involves things like meditation, journaling and talking about what I love.  In the end it’s pretty much just mindfulness full stop.

P.S. It was 8 hours between me almost finishing this post and writing the last few sentences. Hmmm, there’s a few too many hours of blog reading and twitter in there.