SO many plates spinning rn. I was convinced that finishing Te Whāinga was the light at the end of my tunnel. But instead, new old tasks have popped back up like buried bodies, like dust under the rug. I shouldn’t speak of them like that. These tasks were once ideas, goals, points of inspiration – they still are. There was a time when I felt a shortage of them, when after several hours of binging a show I didn’t even care that much about I wondered Is there more? Am I doing enough? You bet there’s more. So much.
For the past few months I’ve been meditating using audio guides – beginning the first few moments of each day to the sound of another’s voice, of the stroke of a harp. But yesterday I forgot to charge my headphones so, for the first time since I can last remember, I was left to the sound of my own brain. HOLY shiT there’s a lot going on in there! It ends up that the mantras and chimes weren’t actually leading me down a sound path, they were distracting me from the fact that I’ve gone way off track.
A lesson of meditation is that, when I find myself in such a disposition, it’s not about trying to steer myself back. It’s about being okay with the fact that I’m here, and discovering what this situation is trying to tell me. I think? I don’t know, I haven’t actually engaged with spiritual leaders, communities, or literature enough to know whether the past few years have actually just been me putting on a caricature of mindfulness. *here’s where I resist / let myself jotting sign up for meditation classes on my long to-do list*
But the fact that I’m here writing again, at least for today, is a start. Yesterday I thought it would be okay to skip journaling, only to find myself in a tar pit of an email exchange that I started by being too verbose. It ends up that the simplest tasks are the hardest habits to pick up.