I went out to Columbia Lake this morning. My head felt sleepy, while my body felt relatively strong. I couldn't quite figure out what I was doing. I didn't really know why I was going. The invisible walls that are so hard to pass are starting to make this whole thing less interesting.
I stopped at the stormwater lake by the little willow, which I often do if I feel sleepy and unsure. The light was bright and cold. I read Lord of the Rings until I felt my motivation, my certainty about my journey begin. Frod was climbing the mountain north of Minas Morgul. The grass and weeds around me were bobbing in the cold air.
I stopped just on the other wide of the Gate, an opening in the hedgerow just south of the lake. A cut path turns east briefly through the scrub and trees and then comes out due south between tall grass, short trees and soybean fields. Standing at the turn, I looked out over a vista of soy, trees, and roads in the distance.
I sat there for a long time. I just wasn't sure how to go forward. I didn't want to make myself go forward just for the sake of doing this loop. I need to shift my brain through time, not my body through space. The air was cold in the shade. I sat with my back to the sun and felt the cool air, until I felt ready to move forward in the here and now.
Once I was moving again, I began to feel very tired again, sleeply, unclear, and without motivation. I continued to need to resist the pull to just plunge ahead without thought, driven only by mad, blind desire to get somewhere, do something, without any awareness. I sank into the tiredness and began to feel sad, about a particular relationship. This was clarifying, somehow. Feeling sad meant I did not feel madly driven, and thus at least risk of anxiety. I felt present. I kept going. I wasn't planning to do the loop but then at a certain point, I was. I was making the decision. This is the point where I often feel anxious and then get overwhelmed. This time, I began to feel that if I went forward, it would be less frightening and distressing. It would be easier, in my anxiety and pain, to just quietly go forward. Like being in the dentist chair, like facing stress at work, it's more grounding to just move forward, instead of fight to get away or strategize about going back. I think right now this feeling is only accessible when I am right in the middle of something - it's difficult to imagine it looking forward into a situation. I think right now this forward feeling is a motivating factor in mostly stark moments of near desperation (because on some level, every stark moment - the moment when you simply realize you cannot be anywhere else, that there is only one reality, and you are not in control of it - is always to some degree a moment of desperation for me), rather than a full time operating strategy - but I hope and believe that is slowly coming.
I didn't race. A feeling of stillness came over me, of my body steadily pedaling forward. I looked around, in curiousity, into the trees along the path. When I came out the other side, at the bottom of the hill at Bearinger and University, I felt almost completely at ease. So much so, and liking so much that feeling of being "away", that I began to explore the area. When I imagined going back around and up the hill, the originally planned loop, I didn't want to. I could feel energetically how inside my zone it feels like tightened mind - familiarity, patterns, repetitive thoughts and ways of orienting. A safe space, for sure, but a tight one, and to some degree, at times, demoralizingly boring.
After some exploration of the area, I began to have the thought that I should go back down the path. At first it felt too scary, and I certainly didn't pressure myself to do it, but then after a while, I thought about driving the next day and how I'd want to see how long I could be out of the car - how, if I am preparing to go to Staff Appreciation Day, I want to know I can "go forward" for an extended period of time, so I made a quick decision, as I was climbing up the hill, turned my bicycle around, and set myself on te path.
Then when I was on it, the familiar thoughts arose: "What are you doing? This is the kind of decision you always make that hurts you, snap decisions motivated by future anxieties! These are the ones that make you panic! You could panic. This could be the 'really bad trip'. It could be the one." I kept going, holding this, not sure why I was holding it or whether it was a good idea to hold it, instead of turning back, which felt like the deepest form of self care. And then a new thought arose, and I said to myself, "Well, if that was the reason you made the decision, you're here now, and you can orient from a different place than the one you made the decision from. Just because you made a decision in the recent past from an unhealthy place, doesn't mean you can't live with your decision in a healthy way. Turning back doesn't have to be the only way to self-care. Being here now in a healthy way is possible and could give you access to even better self-care mental patterns, patterns which don't require you to limit yourself to certain actions and places, and break down after one mistake, but patterns which you can take with you anywhere you go."
I can recognize that I made the decision under a certain set of conditions but now I can come from a different perspective to abide in and work with the results.
I don't believe this was simply a result of changed beliefs, as if the above is a statement I could have simply memorized and willed into lived experience be repitition or recall. I think that due to my meditation practice, my capacities are stronger than they once were to stay calm in the face of physical and mental discomfort, including that discomfort I bring on myself (in these moments, often lines from a Radiohead song comes up: "You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts!"). I think my capacity and spontaneously arising inclination to self-care is now slightly stronger than my capacity to rush ahead blindly, so that mistakes - situations I find myself in that are the results of times of unclear thinking - can be remedied in the moment by an accessible reserve of clear thinking and calm focus.
Coming along, feeling more peaceful now, I became spontaneously and unusually irritated by the noise of my bike tires on the fine gravel path. My mind said, "What if I can't stand this noise and I go crazy? There is so much more path to go!" What a strange discomfort, particularly because I usually like this noise. I think that this anxiety came up for me in this moment as a little aftershock
of the inital bigger fear. My mind was still on alert and it was finding
things. Being aware of that, I recalled my experience at the dentist again and reminded myself that if I can just keep being aware of the strange or novel feeling (for example, having freezing during dental work) it can become familiar and not a source of fear and anxiety. I do not have to be threatened by it - I can engage with it quietly and gently and steadily.
Then the Gate path was back before much time had passed and I felt deliciously happy. The sun was bright and deep yellow on the trees, and the sky opened up before me over leaves and grass shimmering the wind. I passed the gate path to take the slightly longer trail back through the hedgerow, and moved on into the rest of my day.
