All That's Ordinary and Illuminated is Not Awesome
Recognizing that life is hard clarifies the journey
I have a tendency to accentuate the positive. This is a good outlook, but not always helpful. There are many maladies and mental images that cause unease-to-full-on-anguish and must be addressed if mindfulness is to be a constant companion in the fast, slow, or breakdown lanes of life.
It’s important to say that all states of mind, sensations, and feelings are transitory—things change—but this realization of entropy can be restated as, things fall apart. While some conditions can be alleviated by a mindful curiosity into the depths of the condition, others, in my experience, have a much greater stranglehold over even my desire to be present with the suffering. A full-body anxiety for me is just such a thing and so I have great compassion for those with conditions like ALS where this is a constant source of physical sensory suffering.
Our aches and pains increase through the years, our regrets and strings of unwise words, deeds, and actions probabilistically increase, and we lose ourselves in anger, resentment, or just wrong-side-of-the-bed grumpiness. In these times, I’ve even caught myself petulantly not wanting to be mindful! I don’t want to investigate the experience, I’m just fine pouting, thank you very much!
The experiences and genetics that create your next negative thought or sense experience are different than mine, so the advice of not grasping for pleasant or being adverse to unpleasant must be balance with the advice of doctors. I take medication occasionally to sleep, but also realize that factors like dehydration or lack or even incorrectly timed physical exertion can play a role in my restlessness. Deepening your experience of a pain in your mouth might be advisable for all the time before and during your emergency root canal, but no longer!
If this newsletter seems to miss that the advance of entropy increases uneasy states through life for all and chance has brought great suffering on some, that has not been my intent. Mindfulness has given me a point of view of equanimity that believes ordinary experiences offer majesty, wonder, and illuminate something special within us all... AND the realization that mindfulness only works some of the time and not always when you need it.
The jujitsu of deepening your mind-full-ness on unsatisfactory experiences is hard and sometimes is less helpful than creating a narrative of a future self that is doing something about it. That is all fine, take care of yourself, and start again with curiosity on the present when you are up to it.