"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" - W.B. Yeats

Comfort ain’t all it’s cracked up to be!

Now, maybe thats my Catholic upbringing speaking, but some days, it’s just not worth getting out of my nice bed, from my beautiful pregnant wife’s side, in our cosy apartment. Its hard to decide what to wear from my pretty good clothes collection, and my greater-than-average collection of shoes. Some days it’s hard to focus on the taste of my homemade granola and organic yoghurt. Sometimes the short walk to my local favourite coffee shop, the one with the sunlight streaming through the window onto the homemade wooden tables, with the friendly staff and patrons, is a blur, one that I just can’t appreciate. Some days, my cup of good coffee, roasted locally and delivered to my nice local coffee shop, doesn’t taste like much.  I might break my own rules and check my iPhone just as a distraction. Some days, I open my fancy laptop and tune in to my favourite free streaming music station, open Scrivener to write and feel utterly despondent. FML.

You see, somedays I’m just distracted. Nothing is working, Nothing has worked, and nothing will ever work again. Everyone, EVERYONE is doing better than me and that wont change. My thoughts ricochet between 1 of 2 things; what I should be doing in the future and what haven’t I done in the past. I’m stuck and I’m time travelling. My rational brian can’t get over all this and move onto something productive, and instead starts thinking of things like going to the cinema. Its looking for the solution  to a problem in the ocean depths by paddling it’s weak oars furiously on the surface. My “feeling brain” is doing the time travelling. Its remembering places in the past where I could have done better, places where I missed an opportunity to do better, to have more fun, to connect with someone more. I’m stretched between these 2 opposing forces and it’s hard to spring myself out. Its not a case of being caught in a tight spot, it’s more of a loose spot.

Usually it feels like there is no way out. Except for me to read what I just wrote and cop on.

All this thinking, all this to-ing and fro-ing, I find fascinating but the questions remains; is it useful. I think it’s a supremely healthy thing to keep tracks of your thoughts, to watch yourself think, be able to spot any signs of trouble and get out ahead of them. Its a difficult thing to be the marshall of your own inner world, but if you don’t do it, no-one else is going to do it for you. Or worse still, someone else will do it for you and thats when you get really stuck.

With our thoughts we create the world, as Buddha told us, but thats hard to remember in time of great discomfort. The hard thing about it is that it feels like a tiny effect when forced up agains the wall of black thought that can engulf us. Its essential that we try to remember it though. Thats all the world is, and it’s all within us. Feels pretty small now, doesn’t it?