I am quite sad recently. Sad and lonely. The consequences of my past still reverberate. But life feels more subtle.
loader oxygen 2.8
Worry not if you are faced with problems. Do not play continuing scenarios in your head. Refuse all words in your head and go about your business, sleep when it is met. Your head will think without your help, just as you breathe and walk without constant attention or fuss to your lungs and legs. In due course, your mind will resolve any dilemma for you. Your mind will seek, by instinct, what it needs to solve difficulties. Let your instincts guide you. The right book or conversation or flying bird will show you the answer, or where to look.The world is far stranger than we know or understand. I don’t understand why it works, but my experience is that it does work—if you let it; if you trust it. But this is still not enough, you must review what you find, you must analyse, you must learn. If you are to seriously advance, you must not trust blindly. To trust blindly is a good way to walk off a precipice. You must balance between too much concern and unconscious, blind unconcern. Balance is at the heart of wisdom. [abelard]
As I go through my day I feel the words rising in my mind and I quickly quell them by paying attention to my breath or the snow or the extreme cold. A bedpost, the sounds of my jacket brushing on a doorframe, smiles where I never used to see them...
It's amazing what we miss.
Well, I got all four of my wisdom teeth removed today as planned. Apparently they were all impacted, something I did not know, but it wasn't a problem. They put me out and the rest of the day I've been eating soft stuff and keeping ice on it to keep the swelling down. I haven't felt any pain at all...yet. I have Percocet to deal with that later. That should be...fun.
It seems like so much we do in life misses the point. We get so caught up in things sometimes we forget the original intent... and then we are led to negative states of mind. People get too caught up with future promises and rewards. People go to school and work, often enjoying it, but with some future goal always in mind. Happiness is always tomorrow... it's such a tacit and popular sense of thinking it's difficult to realise how seriously it inhibits our creativity, spontaneity, ability to love, and all the rest.
It's a cliche that the point of the journey is the journey itself, but it's true. Living in the moment is not a way of doing things, it's a state of mind. We think it means to always be happy with what you're doing, but that's not really true... it means that no matter what is going on now, be fully aware and immersed in it, whether in happiness, despair, neither, or both.
I think there are moments we all have when the universe sort of comes to a single point, and we feel fully "there"... neither caught up in the whirlwind of future or the obscured murky past. What's done is done, and the future is uncertain. We can always try to plan ahead and learn from our past, but these are different from living in the future and the past.
It can sound kind of bleak and depressing to think our past is nothing more than a collection of colored memories and the future nothing more than an educated guess. What is not depressing, in the end, is to be sad when you are sad and happy when you are happy. In this way, life is constantly renewed in each moment, regardless of what comes your way.
"If thine eye be single, thy body shall be full of light." Matthew 6:22
Well, I've felt rather ridiculously good the past few days. I guess it's just the cyclical turnings of the neurochemical cocktail, but... maybe it's that I've sort of resolved a few personal issues.
I'm sort of avoiding my real life friends, though I'm not sure why. Part of the reason is that one of my friends wants me to smoke weed with her again, and since I've decided to avoid those sorts of things (certainly alcohol, but that's old news), I don't want to be tempted into doing it. It's not that I can't easily say no...it's that I'm still curious about it, seeing as how I only did it once, and I wouldn't have any problem with doing it again. I just look at her, as well...she kind of requires it as an anti-anxiety drug. I guess there's nothing terribly wrong with that, but I know how easily people become dependent on stuff like that, and though I don't consider myself particularly susceptible to that, I don't want to be addicted to weed in any capacity.
Also, although it's a cliche, there's something kind of disturbing about having to take drugs (including alcohol) to be comfortable around people and have "good times." I think learning how to do that without them before deciding to use them is somewhat important, and something I am not able to do yet. I don't know. My experience with pot wasn't particularly amazing anyway, it's just like being dizzy and stupid with red eyes and a thumping heart. Wow.