Do you ever get to feeling small? As though under the weight of some gargantuan? I find my stillness interrupted by wandering worries; the pestilence of anxiety. Perhaps there is something more to this than the simplicity of meditation, perhaps that the more organized and objective my unique thoughts become, the more they are fulfilled by recognition. It is being seen that these feelings really only desire. They boil like a frightful sea, but in the end, they amount to little more than steam. I think I will go on struggling this way for many years to come, because how can one become so reasonable as to parse individual thoughts and emotions as though they were playing cards? I don’t think that is a reasonable objective. Instead, I’d like to suggest we practice the slow diligence of meditation; the quiet release of the breath. I find tranquility in the sound of my breathing… as it passes through me. The feeling of its arrival. The ease of its departure. Over and over.

But I’m not good at this by any stretch. I’m a work in progress, but a willing one; prepared to make discipline of a belief. In some sense, it’s one of the few things I can actively control, and yet, the capacity to do so is in need of maintenance. I don’t recoil at the thought of practice, but I do recognize it as difficult… because it is. Mindfulness.

I am in a contemplative state. I find the hours of the evening dwindling. The charisma of the day is short on exuberance, all bedded with the tired of sleep. I can’t fathom the strain of being the sky, the sun, the stars. It’s a big responsibility. Certainly more than I pretend to understand, but clearly something larger than myself. In the vast unknown of all that surrounds us, I’m little more than a blade of grass. An organism directed to survive as it should, as it was programmed to do by instinct. It’s overcoming this instinctual compulsion that lies at the heart of my contemplative meditations. I have a measured control over it now, where before it ran free, unbroken, untamed. Instinct can drive the gears of survival, but when and where? My “execute appropriate emotion” command is totally fucking broken. We know this by now. I need a chance to catch my feelings by their coat-tails and address them. I yearn for these emotions to get what they want, the attention of understanding. Isolating them, stuffing or otherwise not coping will only imbibe failure.

I wonder about the future, not in the usual anxiety-driven sense, but instead, with an openness to what unexpected things await us all. We’re just as likely to go on with or without inspiration, but it is the randomness of time, the whim of change, that never-ending puzzle of chance… that is the mystery of life, of living. We don’t become alive and aware to then NOT pay attention to our world. People are driven by their senses, they are our strongest guides. But trust them as they should be, not becoming more than they can ever be. Our minds are a sense too, because it there that we make the decisions based on sensation, or input. We trend as we were built.

To break free of restraint is to understand the depths of the self. This is the primary objective in my introspective life reconstruction effort. I’m determined to build myself up strong, and solid as I am, for who I am, for what I can be.

It’s my hope that this blog, this little creative outlet I have for my thoughts, can mark the tides coming in and out. They are on the rise now, and may be headed to never before seen heights. We may be headed for disaster. Who knows? That’s why we play the game.