Cape Cod in the Rear View Mirror

Spent last week camping with my lovely family up in Cape Cod. So, so, so beautiful. I got to spend time with my amazing nieces, J and M, who just fill me up inside with happy. And quality time with ugly - I mean, my sister - is always welcome. Even got to have some good conversations with my brother. All in all, it was a great trip. The weather wasn't flawless, but it wouldn't be a family camping trip without a little rain and some damp nights. The beach was beautiful, the lake was calm, everything went really super well. Then as I got up for work this morning I was surprised with the next two days off! So now I have plenty of time to get things back in order, and more importantly, stay in touch with myself. When I'm camping, I'm so very relaxed and happy and connected to myself. I love the woods, and the ocean, and the breeze and campfires and family. It's all exactly what paradise is for me. But I'm so quick to loose that when I venture back into the "real world" - partially because the real world has always been referred to as a bad thing. But it's not. I know it's not. My world, my "real" world, is full of Kai Chi Do and Yoga and Family and Nature and books and movies and a countless number of things that make me happy. The things I stress about are not the real world simply because they are negative. Call me crazy, but I refuse to accept that the real world is a negative place. I'm not being naive, I'm being hopeful. I can, and will, fill my real world with things I love, so that when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep at night, I'm happy with the life I'm living. I don't want to do things that feel wrong because some part of me thinks I have to. Obviously, I need a job, I need to make money. I have responsibilities that aren't always fun. I'm not looking for an easy way out. I just don't see why those have to be negative aspects of my life. Maybe they don't. Maybe I'm the only one who carries around that weight, that assumption that those tend to be bad things. Cause they certainly don't have to be. Life is such a beautiful abstract concept. It can be anything I want it to be. But really. It can. So why not start now?

Genuine Tea Drinking

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

- Titch Naht Hanh Isn't it tragic that so much of our lives are spent doing things because of the past or for the future? I mean, I'm not silly enough to believe that the past isn't a part of who we are, and I realize how difficult it is to let go of the future entirely, but more and more it seems like there is very little, if any at all, energy devoted to the present moment. I've often said that if we keep living in a world where we'll "be happy when" (when it's the weekend, when the house is clean, when I get a new phone... etc) then we'll never get there. Because "whens" will always pop up. There's no final destination. This moment, right now, the breath that we are taking at this exact instant, that is our world. Our life. The time we were searching for. Because all we ever truly have is the present. The past is a blur of memories. We don't have any grasp on it as a reality because it no longer exists. Anything we hang on to is our interpretation. And the future has yet to happen. We don't know if it will, and on what time line. We certainly don't have any clue who or where we'll be in x number of days, weeks, years. So the amount of energy that's wasted on things that we have no hold of is in fact the only thing that makes those abstract ideas present in our life at all. Our thoughts. And then we're faced with the concept of letting go of the past and the future. Which for me just becomes frustrating. Very frustrating. I can almost get there when I'm in the middle of a Kai Chi Do process and I'm breathing and SA-ing and really embracing the happiness I'm feeling - so why can't I when I'm sitting at home trying to relax? I think the answer to that question is the "trying" part. We can't do it when we're focused on the negative effects behind it, and how or why we want to eliminate it. Eliminating is, in itself, a negative action. So when we try to do something negative to override something else that's negative, we're still left with negative. My thought is to instead fill yourself up with positive until this moment is exactly where you WANT to be. Think about other, happy things. Stand in the sunshine. Look around a find something beautiful. Better, look inside and find all the beauty that you're made up of. On of my favorite methods for harvesting the happy is to put everything to the side and sit in an open space and do yoga. Just stretch and move. It makes me feel beautiful, and it makes my body feel so much better physically. I don't push myself - my goal isn't to get fit, it's to feel good. So I do what feels right. It gives me a small piece of time to just get in touch with my body and listen to it. And it's funny, it usually only lasts ten minutes, but I never watch the clock. I just do it until I feel grounded and present, and then I go about my day. It doesn't feel rushed or timed. It feels right. But that's just the point. When you can meet in the moment and find that space in your thoughts, in your timeline, that beautiful instant that you are currently inhabiting, and be there because it feels good, then that's the real accomplishment. Nothing you change about the outside world is going to fix your inside world. You live inside yourself, you experience your environment and interpret it based on your internal conditions. If you can't see, don't clean your house. Clean your glasses. That's my rainy day thinking, anyway. So now I'm going to curl up and enjoy my breath. I'm not going to think about what needs to be done, or what time it is. I'm going to try to let go of my dread for getting up early and going to work. I'm going to stop and breath and be thankful for this exact moment.