Right now

Sometimes life seems hard.  Damn hard. You know the beauty is out there/in here but you just can’t see/hear/smell/touch/taste it. You can still feel but it hurts.  Everything turns to ash. 

And, no matter how much you sleep, you are simply tired, bone tired – physically, emotionally, spiritually.  And you know it’s only you that can change how you feel, even if you cannot change the physical essence of it.

In the past I would probably have drunk or eaten myself to oblivion, or lost myself in TV or trashy books or cried me a river. Now I just meditate.  Nothing fancy.  Just following the breath.  You know – inhale, exhale. Or rather, inhale – pause – exhale – pause. Sometimes longer; sometimes shorter – just quietly observing where it wants to go; not forcing it; just letting it be. Sometimes for hours and hours. And it’s…beautiful.

Am I suggesting you try it if you’re feeling crap; if life is playing dodgeball with you?  Only if you want.  ‘Oh, I would but I can’t meditate…’  I can hear you, y’know.  *smile*  

Then all I can say is maybe try taking it moment by moment.  Once, years back, when I was in Italy, visiting my dear old friend the Contessa, I was consumed, eaten, gnawed at, by anxiety. It was so overwhelming I thought I would die – every minute.  And she said: ‘Take each moment and ask yourself: “Am I alright now? Am I alright this very second?”’ This very second. And, weirdly, I found I was.  And, if you're really honest, you usually are – sort of.

And if you string each okay moment onto the next okay moment, like links on a chain, you…kinda meditate actually. 

Anyhow, there you go. And there you are. Alright?  

I don't have a clue, I really don't...(Part 7,562)

Gorey understands... 

There are some days when I really truly don’t have a clue. I seriously wonder what on earth I’m doing.  I look in the mirror and wince.  I think about the rest of my life and wonder…why?  Why?  It’s not depression.  At least I don’t think so.  It’s simply a total complete lack of comprehension.  Nothing makes any sense. 

In Greece I had reached a sort of peace.  Before that, I’d tried pushing; tried again and again to make things happen; to prod and poke the universe into some semblance of (what seemed to me to be) order. It hadn’t worked. Just left me exhausted and sad at my failure.  I couldn’t figure out what it was all about.  But in Greece, watching the waves, I kinda got the Zen thing. I was content just to let go, to allow what would be to be. To let life unfold whichever way it so wished.  I decided that there were no choices to be made.  And that was fine.

Yet some days it isn’t fine.  I guess it’s allowable to have bad days.  I just freaking wish I didn’t think so much. Wish I didn't feel so much. 

‘I don’t get it,’ says Adrian frequently.  Not now, exactly (sort of), because he’s not here (he’s in a five star hotel in St Petersburg with a butler…actually this does make me smile). ‘I mean, why d’you think about these things?’ he has said, frequently (and doubtless will say again).   And, come to think of it, given I wrote this some time back but didn't post it until now (?), he isn’t even there now – he’s on his way to Norwich.  Possibly.  Depending on when you read this, of course.

But that’s it, isn’t it?  What?  Where? When?  As everything we think of as real is just energy converted into signals converted into a mental representation of experience?  As time is purely created in the temporal lobe of the brain and is not really objective in any way, shape or…time?  As infinity is about everything happening all at once?  And love?  Simply a response created in the mind by chemical reactions in the brain?  Based on what?  What do we mean by love?  Is it simply a crutch?  A panacea? A story we tell ourselves?

Adrian’s right of course.  Thinking, puzzling, probing…just makes us unhappy. 

‘Why do you put yourself through it?’ he says. 

‘Don’t you ever think about this stuff?’ I say. In wonderment.

‘Nope,’ he says.

I need a head transplant.

Anyhow. Today I walked the dogs up to the hill fort.  And for a few minutes the sun was shining and the world looked very beautiful.  I sat down on a log and drank in green.  And I believed in the moment, in just being, in being conscious, present, connected, in this precise second.  And thought, why wait until I get home to meditate – why not do it here and now?  So I did.  Breathing in green.  Trying not to think about how the world is really colourless and odourless and tasteless.  And it was fine.  Just fine.

And then Asbo bit me.  J