2023-01-20 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Friday 🗓 Date: January 20, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 16 – Jan 22, 2023

Ah, good morning folks. I’m back and better than ever. I think the short story contest I’m writing in begins this evening, so it’ll be interesting to take another swing at writing after a bit of a hiatus. Plus it’s for charity, so how can you really hate that. But nothing gets the creative juices flowing like a good ol deadline. Deadline mode, activate.

It’s funny because these morning pages would end up being longer than many of the submissions. The first two rounds are 2500 and 2000 words respectively, and the last two are 1500 or less, so these morning pages really do churn out some word count. That’s not exactly a great metric, but I think it does point to something about the power of unblocking ourselves.

I wake up so tense sometimes. I think it’s the anticipation for work, that I know I have things I should be doing that are still unfinished, so I feel like I should be immediately getting to work on those. But I need to make room for other things, like morning pages, a good shower, and maybe some tea later.

I tried Rob Burbea’s energy body technique last night. It was, to put it mildly, intense. I vaguely thought about it on the walk when I listened to his dharma talk, but doing it while sitting with a bit more concentration made my frontal lobe feel like it was about to explode, in a good way. I also think it kinda fried me. But I think all of that could be attributed a bit to the degree to which I was grasping my attention during the whole thing. I really like the image of “catching” something, that those feelings arise and pass anyways and you’re just catching them as they fall through your mind. Rob’s talks are so peaceful, so earnest.

There’s probably more to say right now, but writing out a bit more about what happened on retreat is hard. I talked to Mom yesterday, and I was trying to explain a bit more about what it was like there, and I feel like it’s almost impossible. The way one’s heart opens up, the way we meet each and every moment — it’s hard to convey that without the mutual understanding that that’s what you’re going to discuss. It’s not like “hey how are you,” “oh you know, doing my best to meet each and every moment of this precious life with kindness.” That’s a weird conversation — although in a way, it’s kinda beautiful. Heh, I’m thinking of a story where something like that is the opening line, and it seems kinda humorous.

Bah, 1500 words is actually a lot. I do kinda laugh at my internal monologue being so focused on “number go up” approaches to these morning pages, but it earnestly is the way I’m thinking about them. Like it’s a habit I need to do everyday, and even if I kinda lose steam a few hundred words in, it’s also partially about building the patience, stamina, and ability to continually come up with new topics on the page. I think I often go, hmm what to write about? I guess just whatever happened yesterday, which is somewhat limiting, and I tend to run out of topics pretty quickly.

Technology sucks. It’s almost comical the degree to which I’ve wasted big portions of my life on them, and it’s also comical how quickly parts of it have fallen away. I stopped using my phone on retreat, and since I’ve gotten back, I kinda just haven’t used Twitter? Which is a bit sad since that’s how I found a lot of interesting spiritual folks, but it also feels like I’ve run my brief course with it for now. I often go in these cycles where I use Twitter intensively for months at a time, leave it, then go back and blow my timeline away to start anew. I at various times got into writing twitter, Overwatch twitter, TPOT, and probably some cringe shit when I was in high school. Those were all meaningful to me, in retrospect, but also very few of them — aside from maybe TPOT? — had drastic changes in my life. I have some writing connections on Twitter (”connections” meaning “some people and publications that follow me”) that might be nice to nurture from time to time, but that’s about it. I think most other things I’d be okay with dropping, at least temporarily.

That last paragraph starts with “technology sucks” and basically ends with “actually Twitter has been an important part of my life in many ways.” Ell Em Ayy Oh.

Every time I get to a point where I run out of words, Bill Wurtz starts playing in my head. An appropriate soundtrack. Do most people’s brains have weird shit like this going on? Are brains just dripping the weirdest, craziest bits of our lives into every dull moment? Do people who attempt to always fill those empty spaces miss out on that? Is that a bad thing?

Sometimes I have that weird moment of realization that everyone else has this brain that’s (probably) just as nonsensical as mine, and yet the vast majority of people never make concentrated efforts to understand it. That seems bad.

I also sometimes worry that I spend too much time naval-gazing and peering into my own thoughts, and that in some ways it may be better to actually just battle-test the shit out of it. Maybe having a big, ambitious goal is the way forward, and fighting tooth and nail until I get there is the real way through. You learn the skills you need along the way. Ah, I picked up what I needed for survival for too many years — I think it’s time for a bit more than that. But still, not a bad reminder. We practice in order to put things into practice. We practice for the rest of our lives.

Alright y’all, we’ve spent enough time dilly-dallying. Time to pound through 500 more words. Not stopping, not doing anything but letting these fingers fly across the keyboard as fast as I can type. Normally I’m sitting here really thinking and then getting distracted by the internet and then googling something and reading a whole-ass wikipedia page (a whole ass-wikipedia page, more like it amiright) but no, this is the time we get it going. Sometimes I just feel like making spaghetti, but the past few days I’ve been ordering a lot of chicken. I wonder if eating meat for the first time after going vegetarian for a while is what gave me that really weird chest pain. Although the spiritual part of me wants to say it was my heart rejecting being back out in the real world again. It’s funny how I can now catch myself a bit better and bring myself back. Coming back over and over again, that is devotion. I don’t think I really understood that word. I think a lot of these religious-adjacent words I associated with being hard-nosed when I was younger, that devotion was unwavering and rock-solid and something that I didn’t have, but devotion is really the steadfast intention, even when the heart sways. Devotion can be earned, and it points to a particular kind of giving, of letting go, that can be deeply powerful.

I moved all my furniture around and now I’m amazed at all the space there is. Like, this apartment feels so spacious now, it almost feels a bit empty, but I like the idea of being able to just sit quietly on the floor anywhere, that’s real freedom. Also, sitting on the floor is underrated. (I sure do use “also” way too much. Not really a criticism, but it does make things sound weaker.) Alright lads, it’s been an hour, I think it’s time to wrap things up. Clock it in, it’s the end of the workday, we say as the whistle blows and the billows of smoke gradually fade. I say all this as my real work day (eh, is it really real?) is set to begin in another hour. “Paying job” is a little more like it, although I hope this eventually pays too maybe. Or not, that would be fine. May I continue to put these words down, without cost, for the benefit of all beings, over and over.

(That would’ve been a beautiful ending if I had just put about 50 more words before it, but you know me — gotta make the numbers line up here. No cutting corners, no sirree, no in this household. Alright, you may now carry on with your regularly scheduled program.)