Bog Mummy Take the Wheel

Basically. 

My emotional life is fucked. But I am practicing taking refuge in the present. And remembering that no behavior is required of me. In fact, given some current circumstances, non-action is required. Or, at least, non-action is the most skillful behavior, 

Dislocating, wrenching, breath taking desire for one who is not present evaporates when I bring myself into this moment. And if it doesn't evaporate, it is at least simply what I am feeling at this moment. The wanting loses the edge it has that it will kill me. It's just a state of being, right now. It doesn't have to be accompanied by either memory or projection. I don't have to do anything about it. Even if it still feels like a flaming shirt I can't remove. 

Doing the right thing, the healthiest thing, and the best thing is a lot easier when I just don't do any damn thing at all, often. 

It's easy to tumble toward. There's primal magnetism there. One single simple disclosure seems like it could open the floodgates. I feel we're both trying our best to keep that from occurring. 

Then the projections creep in. "Is it going to be this way for years? Will it never? Will it ever? What will I do if I feel like this forever? What will I do if I still feel this way in an hour or tomorrow?" But a few deep breaths, the effort to train my mind back to this present moment and remember, nothing is happening right now that is any threat. I'm having a feeling. That is all. 

It's exhausting. 

I was reading about a guy who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. He said that, before he jumped, he was utterly disconsolate, hopeless and absolutely convinced he wanted to die. But the weirdest, most terrifying thing happened as soon as he jumped. He was instantly full of regret and desperately wanted to live. He was falling to almost certain death and felt hope again for the first time in years. 

The reductivist in me thinks this was just his body's and ego's survival instinct, bred in the bone over millions of years, where survival is the top priority. One of the things about suicides is they find some way or other to guarantee they will get past that survival instinct, the raw and fierce fight of the body to keep sucking air. Sometimes, people who hang themselves handcuff their hands behind their backs. Or I think of Virginia Woolf, walking into the river with weights on her feet. Or the preponderance of gun suicides among men, who at least intend to not let there be any way out created by the primal animal survival instinct. The time between trigger and oblivion is too short, although it is not as short as an electrical impulse, and I wonder if people who kill themselves by gunshot have, even so, a microsecond of regret. 

Another possible explanation for the terrifying return of hope that our bridge jumper experienced is that the moment brought him fully into the present. How could it be otherwise? Unless one were drunk or otherwise numbed, that sensation of free fall and flying would probably snap anybody out of past and future. And in the blinding moment when he was fully present, he remembered that all the shit that made him hopeless was imaginary. It had already happened and could not be changed, or it was in an imagined future and had no substance. So he was suddenly fully in the pure present, and remembered what it is like to be alive. The thought that such an experience might happen with every suicide is enough to quell a lot of my idle fantasies. 

Taking refuge in the present is the only experience that makes certain realities possible for me, other than the experience of flow, which is similar. With flow, I am lost in play and work, and engaged enough that none of the past or future shit matters so much. This here right now is consuming enough. Flow experiences are crucial during times of loss or difficulty because they offer a kind of waking oblivion that can be very healing. But even more powerful for me right now are those flashes, especially during sitting meditation, of complete presence. No past, no future, no longing, no remorse, no hoping, no desolate story telling. None of that exists. 

Not news for anyone who has a spiritual or meditation practice. I am grateful to have even brief moments taking refuge in the present. I was describing to a friend the difficulty of wanting who I can't have and he said "yeah but how different is that from any time, really? We always want who is not around when they aren't around. You couldn't have her when you were still in the affair either. So what has really changed?" I'll tell you what has changed. The future. But of course, I'm telling the story of the future either way. The present has not changed. 

One of the games we played to take the edge off was scheduling visits every two months or so. "Something to look forward to." I think this is essentially harmless, most of the time. But now, I have nothing to look forward to. And both of those phrases are stories about the future that is not happening now. 

Anyway, at other times, I'm just immolated and bereft and that's that. Wanting. But working anyway. Getting a lot done on the dissertation. A grant proposal. Poking around for a post doc or a teaching job. I still feel that old bog mummy could be running a far better show than I am currently running. 

Missing and missing. Wanting. 

It is what it is.