Therefore, I do not view the self as an improvement project that begins with incompletion and evolves towards completion. The chaos does not need to be ordered. The entropy does not need to be reduced. The demons do not need to be tamed. The jagged edges don’t need to be smoothed out.
A man in love is unmasked. He has no preferences, makes no distinctions, acknowledges no differences, sees himself in everyone. He has, in effect, ceased to be a person.
A man in love
Cold feet
Warm heart
Today
We had a power cut today so I spent the time chopping wood for the stoves.
What’s the cliché? He who chops the wood warms himself twice? Or something along those lines.
The brook has returned to its normal level now after the floods, running clean and bright. No rain forecast for a few days now which might give the land time to dry out a bit. A neighbour who has lived here for twenty years said he’s never seen it so bad.
If I am constantly on the move, tripping, going from here to there and back again, then I am in a restless state, hanging on to the outer rim of the wheel. I will seek relief from this mental foment in experiences of pleasure. But, of course, no pleasure lasts for long; it invariably yields to the restlessness that creates the desire for pleasure in the first place. Where, then, is my release from pain? Nowhere else but at the centre of the wheel. Where there are no distinctions. Where indifference to one is indifference to the other.
Rest-less
The insights of so-called awakening/ enlightenment are not acquiring new information but simply recognising what we already are.
A day off today between a twelve hour shift yesterday and another one tomorrow. In my old job this would have depressed me greatly but these days I couldn’t feel better about it. Such is the profound magnitude and good fortune to have work that you love. Work that is somehow an extension or expression of who and what you are. And often we don’t know who and what we are until the work allows us to express ourselves. A chicken and egg situation but such is life.
Today will be spent contemplatively, outside in nature, inside with coffee and perhaps an invigorating run down by the river later. But mostly in gratitude for, well, everything really.
All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That’s all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.
— Charlotte ‘Joko’ Beck
Some days I am struck more forcibly than other days by just how much we unconsciously define ourselves and create identities by our preferences. What we like and don’t like. Who we like and don’t like. No wonder we create so much unnecessary trouble for ourselves.
Dawn. Sitting still and silent in my car. The rain has abated, floods receding but the wind howls and gusts on, buffeting the car and bending the trees around me. Coffee cup warm in my hand, the Sunday traffic slowly begins to appear. Who are they, where are they going and why?
So storm Darragh gave us a right old battering! Woke up this morning to the brook raging higher than previously and the ground strewn with debris. Oddly, and despite all the rain, the roads to work were passable albeit by dodging large expanses of standing water and numerous tree branches.
Since moving to ‘the wilds’ from our former urban environment my relationship with the weather has become more ambivalent. As with the rest of life, you get what you get when you get it.
But Life doesn’t conform to concepts. It doesn’t fit into neat categories or frameworks. Life is vast, fluid, and ungraspable, always moving beyond the limits of thought.
There is darkness inside all of us. Unrecognised and unacknowledged it festers and transforms only to emerge in disguise, often as virtue.
Hello Rat in the supermarket car park.
I rarely write about my work and I have no idea why. It seems I am simply not moved to.
That said it appears, today, that I am moved to say something, in relation to a previous post which mentioned imposter syndrome.
To cut an exceedingly long and boring story short, I worked for many years in publishing and marketing as a graphic and web designer.
Although earning decent money and able to provide for my family I found myself empty inside and miserable most of the time. According to the late anthropologist David Graeber I had a ‘bullshit job’.
Imposter syndrome was in full effect. I was a chancer and a fraud and I entertained a persistent inner dialogue of cruel and merciless self criticism and judgement. So far so normal.
And then the pandemic struck. Redundancy followed. I was at a loss at what to do. My wife who knew me better than I knew myself at the time, said I should get a job as a Support Worker in social care. I literally had no idea what she was talking about.
Cut to four years later and I find myself working long anti-social hours, harder than I ever have, on minimum wage, and challenged daily mentally, physically and psychologically/ emotionally. I leave every single shift exhausted, stimulated, drained, rewarded, energised, satisfied, fulfilled and grateful. And I have never been happier.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why? it probably has something to do with the fact that it is work that demands the integrated combination of head, hand and heart. I also think it’s significant that it is work that has nothing to do with competitiveness, business, making money or selling anything. At work I inhabit a world free from the commercial imperative. I never sit in front of a computer. Email, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, lunch breaks, meetings, offices, desks are now nothing more than vague memories and the stuff of nightmares.
The daily preoccupation with profit, reach, statistics, branding, sales, marketing, jargon, promotion, competition, clicks, reports, presentations and strategies etc. has been replaced with concerns about human dignity, privacy, safety, mental and physical health, care, empathy, independence, choice, opportunity, support and encouragement.
I am not saying this is better or more important work than any other. Far from it. Horses for courses. Simply that when one finds, belatedly in my case, work that is most closely aligned with who one is, then any sense of being an imposter doesn’t arise.
In short, I thought I was something I wasn’t and paid the price. Now that I do what most closely aligns with who and what I am, I couldn’t feel more whole, rewarded, alive and grateful.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
— Mary Oliver, The Selected Poems
It is pure fantasy to think that you could have done things differently or lived your life any other way.
This dream of an imagined past feeds an equally unhelpful delusion of the future in which you consciously learn and strive to change ‘yourself’ and do things differently.
All of these behaviours and activities happen, of course, but not as the result of conscious so-called will but automatically and spontaneously from our unconscious.
We do what we do when we do it whatever our conscious awareness may declare to the contrary.
Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.
A curious state of mind today. Not melancholy but floating. Present but not present. Liminal…
If my happiness depends on someone or something or on a particular set of circumstances, then I am one miserable dude. Happiness isn’t a thermometer. It doesn’t go up and down.