2023-09-12 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌞 Summer 🔆 Weekday: Tuesday 🗓 Date: September 12, 2023 📅 Week: Sep 11 – Sep 17, 2023

I am once again writing my morning pages at 8:30 at night and sipping a beer. I also once again am going to start off morning pages by saying that I have nothing to say really. I’m sitting here listening to this Nicki Nicole Tiny Desk concert which is absolutely fantastic. Tiny Desks are great mostly because for a lot of these artists, I actually don’t really like a lot of their music originally, but I love their more acoustic tiny desks. Like Nicki Nicole and C. Tangana are both great examples of this, I absolutely adore their tiny desks, but the vast majority of their music just has terrible instrumentals. It’s amazing how much of a difference a good band makes.

Hmm, what else is going on. Existential Kink is continuing to be helpful if for no other reason than it makes me notice just how much tension I have in my belly and ribs. I continually suck in my stomach quite a bit, which I haven’t really narrowed down very much, but it does contribute to a feeling of release quite often.

I randomly started thinking about Charles Eisenstein’s book, which I think I already talked about in a previous morning page, but it got me thinking about how his failure (so far) in that book is similar to how a lot of meditation masters fail to teach, which is that they have a major insight but have no way to really help other people get to that insight as well. The true Tao cannot be spoken and so on. There’s a dependency problem here, which is that to realize insights one essentially needs to find ways into those insights, but the insights themselves can’t be spoken properly and thus don’t really give people an incentive to look for them. It’s somewhat confusing that meditation folks often say that one shouldn’t strive for enlightenment, and yet striving for enlightenment is precisely how one gets started on the path. Humans don’t really do things for their own sake usually, at least us unenlightened folks.

I also was reading an excellent article about how enlightenment as a term is a combination of a bunch of different things from across multiple different traditions. I think that’s really important to remember that being enlightened is a term that a lot of people use but that they rarely ever explain. It’s equally confusing that many Buddhists come to wrestle with the Buddha’s teachings in wildly different ways. Perhaps that’s simply the result of a teaching without words, with a teaching of method without doctrine — that the doctrine will inherently corrupt. Perhaps that’s fine! Perhaps we simply have no idea what’s down there, or that it’s so far away that putting any words to it is both simultaneously incorrect and correct (or the other third mysterious thing!).

Hmm, it’s funny to reflect now on how different doing morning pages is than what it used to be. I feel like I used to be like “750 words is a lifetime, how would anyone ever write that much” and now I keep checking the word count and finding out that I’m essentially done before I even blink. Do I type faster or something?

Anyways, for later morning pages, I wrote in my dead-tree journal about a writer that wrote down all of his childhood memories in a series of journals that filled his shelves, and I love that idea. My hesitancy there is funny, because I feel hesitant about both (1) the mundanity of so many of those memories and (2) the sort of sad ennui that drips out of most of them. You know, I don’t really consider my early childhood to be all that sad, but as I reflect on a lot of it, I feel a lot of isolation even from that pretty early age, and that feels really sad and depressing to write about. Perhaps there’s some redemption there. Let’s hope so. Part of that is partially probably colored by Mom’s death, and part of that is also colored by the fact that I really struggled with depression towards the beginning of when a lot of my memories become really clear (e.g. early middle school through high school). Of course, there’s also a lot of interesting stories that I’m now remembering: so many band trips and stories, my first relationship (that one’s gonna be painful lmao, but there’s some interesting stuff in there), my high school friend groups (also gonna be weird, shudder). But I can feel all the pain there that needs to kinda be mucked up from the bottom of the proverbial lake. Let’s dig out the skeletons from these closets.