Into the Sweet Fog

[LastThursday]

I guess every journey starts somewhere. Sometimes it starts without even knowing it. And by then going back is impossible and forward is the only direction.

I hope to capture snippets of the moment, in the hope they they'll congeal into something that I can use to propel myself forward.

As an experiment and to kill an addiction, I'm not going to edit anything at all. As soon as it's down, that's it! I hope it's not too bumpy.

Current Thoughts:

What is real? If everything is real, then what is illusion and delusion? Are they real. Yes I think so. But so what. Maybe it's more important that it's useful. Do my delusions help me?

Aims:

Get a handle on where I should be going and stop stewing in minimalism. I have driven my life down to the bear essentials in order to reduce stress and responsibilities and commitments. But in the process something is lost. Do I recover what's lost by losing my identity as well? Or do I ignore spiritual practice altogether and sleepwalk through the rest of life?

Here goes.

[LastThursday]

Damn. Doing an online journal is bringing out the commitment-phobe in me.

I don't think I've quite grasped why avoid commitment. Some of it is to do with avoidance of pain. This is kinda ridiculous, as pain has no particular correlation with commitment. In fact some of my proudest achievements in life have been done through commitment. Did they cause pain? Yes, of sorts. I think I avoid pain because it seems stupid to go through pain, if it can naturally be avoided. No pain no gain, has always seemed to me a strange way of motivating people, it's a disengenuous way of being. 'You will succeed, but it will hurt', just seems spiteful. But in every saying there's a nugget of truth somewhere in there.

Maybe it's just commitment with no foreseeable end? A prison of commitment. Maybe that's closer to the truth. The sort of commitment you have to bear by going to school or work or in a marriage or bringing up kids. I've neither been married or had kids. But I've seen enough examples of crap commitment to marriage and bearing kids to put me off. Why commit if your intent is half hearted or half-witted? So I do commit, but only if my heart is in it and I have enough knowledge beforehand. Perhaps this is too limiting a way to be? No commitment, no progress.

I think my lifestyle minimalism has come out of this way of being. Avoid commitment, by keeping things stripped down and as simple as possible. I also have a fetish for minimalism, small is beautiful. Large, is unwieldy, scary, dangerous even. But I think my life needs largeness, I need to expand out, not stay shrunken in minimalism. My soul wants to be as big as possible, to be the best version of myself.

[LastThursday]

Dear diary,

I woke up today after having dreamt about an ex of mine.  In the dream we were knocking about in a large house. She seemed somehow distant and disconnected, and I knew the game was up. She was doing her things, and I was doing mine. There was a strong sense of not being a 'unit' any more. I woke up with a kind of sadness or melancholy of sorts. 

I had several realisations just as I came to. 

It seems my dreams are firmly fixated in the the past. They invariably involve characters from my (distant) past. This is in contrast to my daytime thoughts, which revolve more around what's happening 'now'. I can't shake off the sensation that there's unresolved stuff that needs sorting out, and that if I sort it out, I will feel freer and lighter and happier. It's like someone is screaming a message, but I'm deaf to the words. I don't understand the language! I need to keep listening and eventually it will click.

Second, is that there seems to be a genuine difference in the quality of consciousness between having my eyes closed an having them open. It's hard to describe, but it felt quite stark as I lay in bed and it's something I hadn't been aware of before. When closed, there's a kind of floating disconnected sensation, almost a kind of pleasantness. When open, everything becomes stable and concrete and matter of fact. It's like having my eyes open distracts from an underlying 'more real' version me.

Other concerns:

The watch word for today is: Ambiguity. This is one of my greatest bug bears in dealing with people, be they friends or family or work colleagues. People are so damn vague and non-committal (yes the irony). Other people just seem not to notice or care about this at all. Except, very strangely, when I deliberately play the game back to them.  Maybe I'm just too unsubtle in my gaming of non-commitment, and it shows? Going meta: why does it bother me so much? 

I think it feels like I'm missing something from my interactions with people. What is it I don't get about ambiguity? Am I supposed to make the first move in resolving an ambiguity? Or am I just supposed to 'read between the lines' and respond accordingly? Or do I just ignore it and carry on regardless? If you were to ask me to organise a get together for a bunch of people, I would refuse: the ambiguity and non-committal nature of people would simply blow my mind.

Going meta meta: fuck ambiguity.