I felt like the fucking man tonight rocking out on the SG. Another one of those times when I feel like I’m just swelling with promise and potential. My mind drifted to thoughts about the old music house, and I was wondering why I never did head the gong while I was there. Part of me feels like I gave up too soon and maybe that I wish I could have a second chance. Of course, [lost my train of thought because MA called to vent about her slack-ass classmates and their group project]. Anyway, the point is, everyday I get another chance to head the gong. Every moment, if I’m awake enough to realize it.
Archive for April, 2004
Sitting around on a Sunday, organizing old files, making phone calls, reading Wilber and Miller. Feeling pretty good in general about life, although I’m not exactly looking forward to returning to work tomorrow morning. Karen called yesterday to announce that she’s pregnant. Pretty wild. I’ve been grouping together all the old journal entries by date, so that I can just roll right on through from the beginning (1998) up to the present, and do whatever it is I’m going to do to get this monkey off my back. It some ways, things are even more gloomy now than a few weeks ago, or at least they would seem that way if I were still in that frame of mind. In deciding not to go to massage school, I’ve left little possibility for anything more than working at the hospital for remainder of the year, a prospect that would normally depress me. But like I said, something has shifted, and I feel more alive and plugged into the sense of possibility than I have in some time, despite the practical realities of work and money, etc. Now that my sister is with-child, that leaves just Jimmy and me out here on the fringes of conventional society. I am content to be unmarried and without children, happy even. If there’s a sense of something “missing” in my life it has everything to do with heading the gong and more fully realizing my personal potential. Self-absorbed or not, transitional stage or not, I simply need to live this thing out, right now.
So about the quiet revolution that has announced itself this past week. I don’t know what to say about it really. I felt different, changed somehow, after I finished reading Hanna’s “Letters From Fred.” Nothing dramatic, just a subtle shift in attitude towards life. Something to do with faith. Anyway, a week or so later I start getting up at 6am every day to meditate and exercise. I started doing everything with a sense of focus and self-discipline. I’m simply doing what I think is the best thing to do, on a daily basis. Things that have been flitting through my mind over the past few weeks or months or even years, things that I have been mulling over, well, now I just do them, without any fanfare or sense of drama. I’ve been meaning to bring my own lunch to work, instead of continuing to eat the shitty cafeteria food. The thought has gone through my mind a million times, but this past week the thought led immediately to an action, the appropriate action. I remember just a few weeks ago saying to Mary Alice that although I think it would be great to get up at six and meditate every morning, I just know I’ll never actually do it. Well why the hell not? What was stopping me and why isn’t it stopping me now. A few minutes ago I gave an inspired speech to Mary Alice about how something has shifted in me, and that I think it has something to do with finally trusting my mentors–Wilber, Hanna, Miller, et al–and endeavoring to take their advice. I suddenly have faith in them, and also in myself in a way that I simply didn’t before. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Nothing dramatic has happened. The shift is very subtle, the only real difference being that I’m doing the things I think are the best things to do in order to give myself the best possible chance of accessing the Fair Realm. Could it be that Fred has responded after all?
As the work-week rolls on it gets progressively more difficult to shake off the impression of the work-day. It’s 9:30pm and time for me to go to bed, yet I feel as if I haven’t really left the hospital. The sensory impressions of the day are still strong enough keep me anchored in that world. Back again tomorrow and the brand is pressed a little deeper into my flesh. What you do shapes you, becomes you, and you become it. We are forever adapting to our environment, molding and being molded. It’s kinda scary.
So, the way I see it is like this: Either it’s true, what so many have said, that we’re all one and everything is okay, and all we need to do is wake up to our true nature, or else it’s all line of shit, and the best we can hope for is that we enjoy ourselves to the full before the credits start to roll. I’ve come to the conclusion that, although I’ve yet to experience anything more than fleeting glimmers of faith in life, I may as well proceed as if the sages and mystics of the world are right. If they’re wrong–that is to say, if I’m wrong–then, well, what does it matter? I simply can’t enjoy myself without the hope, however ill-founded, that there is such a thing as being enlightened, and that living in such a way–what ever it means–is the only thing worth focusing on.