I'm here

Just a quickie to write down something interesting that happened to me this morning.

I've been waking up way too early as it is, and Daylight Saving Time has not helped. Usually the first thing I notice when I realize I'm awake is that flood of adrenaline sloshing through my guts. Once I'm up I can get it back down to a manageable level by exercising – I feel fine as long as I'm moving fairly fast, walking or hiking or riding my bike. If I go hard enough, the effect lasts awhile, at least long enough to give me a few good hours to focus on freelance work. But it always seems to creep back up again, the longer I sit ... bad news for someone whose only source of income depends on spending time in front of a computer.

I feel good while I'm walking. But I can't walk all day.

This gives me pause, when I think about what I'm going to do next for work. Am I really going to try to find another job that involves sitting at a desk? What else do I really know how to do? When I get back from this little Utah trip (driving out tomorrow for a few days, with a friend who's going for business – so, free gas and hotels!) I'm thinking I might re-activate my substitute teaching credential and see if I like being in a classroom at all. That's a job where you actually get to stand up every once in awhile ....

Anyway – on to what happened this morning, and then I've gotta get out of here and get some exercise so I can get this little project finished before I leave tomorrow.

So this morning I had an experience of pure, open awareness, just as I was waking up. I realized I was awake, but there were no thoughts there – I was just there, warm and safe and quiet with the sun shining through the window. Then, the first thought that came into my mind was, "I'm here." That was all. It was just like what the Buddhist texts describe as emptiness – I was just there, and there wasn't any story attached to that moment, or emotion, or judgment, or anything.

It only lasted a few seconds and then there was a thought, "NO JOB!!!!!!!!!!" Then an immediate stab of adrenaline, a gush of terror .... And then for a few more seconds I was actually able to clear all that out and go back to just being there. Then it came back, and I started twitching and shaking and had to get up. Sucks to be sensitive.

What caught my attention thinking about it later was that nothing had changed in my circumstances to cause the change in my physical state. I hadn't even moved my body. It was the story that was being told inside my head that was causing all the hullabaloo. It was in my mind, and not in my body – because my body was totally fine, relaxed and even kind of happy until the story asserted itself again.

Not to discount the story, exactly – it is true that I don't have a job, and I'm going to need to figure out what to do about that. But that fact doesn't have to be the central defining feature of my existence or my state of mind.

So today I'm thinking about how I might learn to have more of those moments of OKness, by practicing refocusing on the present instead of letting my mind go to town on hyperinflated fear stories.

In the meantime, I'm just feeling grateful to have experienced it. The memory of that moment feels like something I'm going to be able to work with for a long time.

The freakout continues

Continuing on the theme of at least one mind-boggling thing happening each day this week (one of these days I'll back up and catch everyone up on everything that went down last weekend, which is when this unsettling string of events began), I got a frantic phone call from Mr. A this afternoon at work, in which he told me that a long-dreaded project at his work is finally about to begin.

Usually when he has to go away for work, it's like this week – he leaves on Sunday, works through the week and is back home by Friday night. This time, he's going to be gone for three months straight. Sparing the ugly details, the schedule they have planned is beyond grueling, and he's understandably extremely anxious.

As for me, I have my own stuff I'm worrying about these days. I don't like it – having worrisome situations in my life, or worrying about them. Actually, I feel like I've already used up my lifetime's allotment of worrying time – free-falling into anxiety and doomsday thinking seems to come naturally to me for some reason, and I've gotten so good at it over the years that I hardly have to make any effort anymore to just instantly descend into a seemingly bottomless pit – maybe more of a tunnel – of angst and nameless despair ...

Except! I'm trying to do things differently right now, and part of that includes not just automatically relaxing back into my same old familiar patterns when things start changing suddenly and at a pace I'm not completely comfortable with.

For example, when I was listening to Mr. A on the phone this afternoon, and he was so upset I was having a hard time understanding him, one thing I did hear him say was, "You know how I get when I have to deal with things like this."

And I thought, but didn't say, "No, I don't know how you 'get.' I know how you've gotten in the past, but that doesn't mean you have to go on that way forever."

I didn't say it because he's still on the road, and he's already upset, and my goal is to support him and help him, not to ascend the soapbox and lecture him about How To Change Your Attitude And Feel GREAT About LIFE!!!™

But seeing him in his struggle, and trying to figure out ways to help him through, is useful for me, too, when I remember to always mirror all my questions and complaints about him, back toward myself. If I feel grumpy, anxious and afraid because I think his attitude sucks, a lot of the time if I really look at it, it becomes clear that the primary reason I'm feeling that way is because my own attitude pretty much sucks. Kind of like right now.

I can really see myself, in this entry, slipping into some dramatic, catastrophic habits of thinking – the kind I'm trying to learn to bypass in order to see things more clearly as they really are.

Not to deny or disregard legitimate emotions and concerns, but the way I want to see this is simple. Not all deep, dark and convoluted. Just ... simple. I feel a list coming on:

1. He's going to be away for several months.
2. I know this does not make him happy.
3. I have some concerns about how he's going to handle his emotions.
4. As for my own emotions, I am stepping up my meek and tentative little yoga practice (which I also want to write about one of these days), making more art, gradually de-hermitizing and reconnecting with friends I haven't seen since summer, and continuing to speak as honestly as I can with him about things that are important to me.

In other news, I'm seriously considering breaking up with Blogger and moving this thing over to Wordpress. I'm sick of the neverending problems with the "new and improved" Blogger, and Wordpress has several features that I'd really like to use, including the ability to password-protect individual entries (not just the whole blog). I'm checking out the options and will leave a forwarding link if I do decide to move.

Small creatures

First of all, thank you to everyone who emailed me to express concern over my last, quite dramatic post. Just when I think that nobody's reading this thing anymore, I suddenly find out that a lot of people still are – and they are (you are) lovely, wonderful, caring people.

I'm okay. The thing that happened wasn't really such a huge shock or revelation, but more just an unwelcome deepening of my understanding of a situation I already knew about ... And if that's too obscure an explanation, I'll just say that I've been reminded of how important it is to me to try to stay present and aware in my own life, and that that is really the most important thing that happened. And it's not a bad thing.

Moving on: Last winter, in an attempt to keep ourselves warm at night, Mr. A and I bought a few of these furry bears that are stuffed with flax seeds, which you heat up in the microwave and snuggle up with in bed. They worked great, but over time their fur went kind of flat and they started exuding a strange (flax-like?) smell whenever we heated them, so we stopped using them. They were still cute, though, so we kept them around thinking we might give them away next time someone with a kid came to visit.

Then this morning I noticed the mice had gotten to them. They'd chewed little holes right through the fur and extracted a cup or more of seeds, which they'd hulled and eaten, leaving a huge and surprisingly neat pile of feathery chaff on top of the Yoga Journal on which the bear was sitting. So I'm back to killing mice again. Sad day. They're so cute, but so destructive. Not only of stuffed bears, but also linens, furniture, walls ... not to mention, they pee constantly wherever they go. Filthy creatures!

Also, on my way to work I accidentally killed a dove with the car. It was standing on the road with a bunch of its friends, who all flew off as the car approached. But this one last dove just kept standing there and standing there, and I kept thinking, "He's going to take off any second! They always do!" And then, he didn't. I hit the brake at the last possible moment, but it was too late. I heard a thump on the bottom of the car, and when I looked in the rear view mirror there was a big pouffy cloud of fine brown feathers trailing out from behind the car. And the poor little brown body, lying on the asphalt. Sigh. He will make a nice breakfast for some larger bird today, I imagine. And maybe there was something wrong with him already – why else didn't he fly away with his buddies?

Finally, I will report that I'm very glad the low-rise jeans thing is coming to a close soon. Yesterday at lunch I saw a supremely curvalicious young woman sitting at a cafe table, with a full three inches of crack exposed at the back of her jeans. No doubt she looked fabulous in them standing up. But man. The crack action was something I just really did not need to see.

Watershed

Something important happened today that I just can't overlook or ignore, something I'm going to have to deal with and something I don't want to deal with. I can't talk about it except to say that my heart is kind of aching and I'm afraid, and I don't like it. I know it will be okay, but I don't like where I am right now.

So all day I've been trying to not to think about it, because today of all days I really have to focus on my work. But I got to a place this afternoon where what I was doing didn't require so much concentration, and so I decided that rather than let my mind go back to obsessing about the thing I don't know how to fix, I would listen to a podcast. I opened iTunes, and there at the very top of the list of new podcasts was this one by one of my favorite people at Insight Meditation Center, Shaila Catherine – titled "Judging: Who Knows Best." You can listen to it here – it's the one dated 2/19/07.

I really need to send those people a check or something, because even though I've never been to their center, I've gained so much from listening to these talks. Today I was reminded that when I find myself feeling angry and superior in my judgments of someone else, it's usually more about me than about them. She says, "We may be thinking that we're judging someone else, but really we are establishing who we are by comparing ourselves to others. Each time we express a judgment we're declaring ourselves and asserting a particular self position in the world, and usually we're judging from a very narrow and limited perspective...."

She makes the distinction between the kind of judging that Buddhists call "wise discernment" – meaning, the ability to identify what is skillful or unskillful, wholesome or unwholesome – and the kind that falls more into the category of contempt for someone or something that doesn't conform to my idea of how things should be. When I'm judging someone this way, I'm not really trying to see or understand them – I'm only looking for confirmation that my way really is the only right way. If I make the effort to look and listen deeply I may still come to that conclusion – but the point is to be willing to stay close enough to really see and connect with compassion, not to prove that I'm right and the other person is wrong, which usually only pushes the other person away.

Anyway, I'm not so interested lately in telling everyone else how I think they should behave. I have enough to do just trying to make good decisions for myself, about what I am going to do.

Augh. Sometimes my life feels totally surreal and out of control, even though to the outside eye it might not appear that much of anything at all is happening. These are the times when I want to just throw my dog and my pillows and a couple of really nice plates and bowls in the car and run away, run away, run away. But you can't run away from your own life.

Better to run toward it.