It’s my impression that I’ve been writing significantly less blog posts since I’ve started my mindfulness journey.
Needless to say, I remain very much a neophyte on the meditation front. In the past, I’ve always assumed that my internal monologue is me. It’s in conversations with myself that I come up with ideas to write about. Now I find that I am the ultimate unreliable narrator. It seems I should not be identifying with my thoughts. Being ‘lost in thought’ is to be a victim, at the whim of any rogue electrical impulse that dawdles across my cerebrum. If I want to take charge then I need to give up the idea that ‘I’ am here, in my head, sitting behind my eyes and watching and commenting on what goes on in front of me. I need to be trying to silence the babble of my thoughts and open up my consciousness to the outside, unhampered by putting my own spin on things. It’s hard, but to complain that it’s hard is a sort of humble brag according to Sam Harris. I think I am making slow progress, but is it possible that ‘waking up’ must come at the expense of creativity? So much of what I’ve enjoyed writing about is wry observations on life, but if I’m trying to actually remove my self from the picture, what’s the effect going to be? We shall see.
I’m going to persist with the meditation, because on the whole I think it’s made my life better. I’m having much less trouble sleeping, for example.
As an aside, the topic of yesterday’s podcast was gratitude. I was expecting a ‘count your blessings’ kind of thing, but what he actually said was, loads of people are waaaay worse off than you. At least a billion people in the world would kill to be in your shoes. If you were suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer today, wouldn’t you give anything to go back to how things were yesterday? I’m paraphrasing, and probably clumsily, but it did feel a bit naughty: “Just be glad you’re not that guy!” But it worked. I am grateful.