2023-06-14 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌷 Spring 🔆 Weekday: Wednesday 🗓 Date: June 14, 2023 📅 Week: Jun 12 – Jun 18, 2023

Early morning journal time. I notice that when I actually get enough sleep, I’m way more inclined to do this. I think my tendency towards having lazy mornings and sitting around watching YouTube is only aggravated by poor sleep. Some days (like tomorrow) it’ll be a bit unavoidable since I have a 6am flight (out of Oakland, no less!), but most days it’s actually felt like a matter of “letting go.” Letting go of the fact that I shouldn’t be up until midnight, burning the candle at both ends in order to write or something. Instead, I should be writing when I feel fresh and bright (like right now), before I’ve burned myself out on other things.

I bubbled all about C.S. Lewis the other day, but perhaps Mary Oliver is due next for my overflowing praise. I’ve been reading A Thousand Mornings and I can’t help but love it.

Hmm, this is another moment of not really having anything to say. I’ll see the family tomorrow, which I’m excited about! Honestly though, I’m a little worried it’s just going to be raining the whole weekend, based on the weather forecast. If the weather gods smile down upon us, maybe we’ll have some sunny skies, but my current guess is that at best it’ll be cloudy the whole time and at worst it’ll be constant thunderstorms.

Sometimes these morning prompts go off into really philosophical territory, but at the moment I just want to rest in this feeling. Mornings are times where the fog of sleep lifts and suddenly you’re thrust back into the world and you feel naked, bare, everything feels suddenly strange. It’s fascinating to me that we feel that sense of alienation every single day, and in some ways it’s a pleasant feeling. It’s not totally unlike the “tenderheartedness” of retreat that I’ve described before. In its best form, that new awareness of the morning can be full of curiosity, excitement, and that fuzzy unconditional love that comes after waking. I’ll admit that I was a bit conditioned to feel this way because my dreams primed me so — I don’t really remember the details, but my dream was one in which I fell in love again, where I found someone with whom that intense passionate love came back once again. It’s a pleasant feeling, after all, and who would deny themselves that feeling.

That’s a curious thing, perhaps. Lewis talked about the idea of happiness and how there are two kinds of people, those who want it and those who don’t. It’s interesting to see multiple facets of myself in that — of course we all want happiness, but I also seem to intentionally deny myself the happiness of romance. Of course it’s nerve-wracking and intense and embarrassing in many ways, but that’s also the fun of the whole thing. You’re trying to make sense of a whole other human being and to take in everything about them, who could possibly think that’s easy?

Maybe that’s more for another day, but the idea sticks around: what are the areas in life where you “don’t want to be happy”?

Much love, king. Smooch.