just being

I have always felt things deeply-really deeply. I also had an inclination that it was not in the same way as other people felt things. I seemed to feel ....more of it ... more of the shading of life. There was never just a day. Each day was a day filled with highs and lows and wishes and wonders






and regret and fear and intense,bright and blinding colourful hope.

That is when it wasn't filled with nausea inducing anxiety or a fatigue so deep that raising my head was an effort. In either case, life was exhausting. But I always felt that life was being lived. "At least I know I am alive" was the encouragement I gave myself when I saw others drift along on an even keel in a leafy waterway as I was riding the crests and troughs of  a perfect storm. I could not envisage a life where emotions went by unnoticed, unappreciated or worse, were not there at all. It seemed somehow to take away from the magic of just being alive, of treasuring every moment.

But, I have to be honest, things have changed. I want the calm of a narrow boat on a summer's day now.  Whatever God is, perhaps he'll grant me that. I have been grieving this past year for the excitement of open water in the form of the life I knew. The one that did not let any feeling go unhindered -each felt instinctively and deeply and categorised under goodie or baddy, black hat or white, John Wayne or Lee Van Cleef. Recently though, I have been actively cultivating an emotionless life. I need to do this so that I don't accidentally slip into mania and then downwards into grinding misery. I have resented every minute of that boredom, and yet..and yet in the middle of the boredom are sometimes moments of such peace that I could cry with relief. Peace is something very rare in my life because it is so very rare in my head. But it's my new goal. You can keep your highs and lows and the day to day feeling with every fibre of your being. Let me be. That's all. To be, quietly, unassumingly and without drama.


Sometimes, a lifetime of peace is so tantalisingly close that I can virtually taste it, but alongside this yearning for peace, I cannot stop filling my life up with things and striving for things. You'll have noticed that even peace is a 'goal' for me. I feel, that since giving up a job that immersed me in emotion whilst requiring me to suppress it, I have filled the extra time with writing and making and entrepreneurial things, decorating and gardening and cooking-all of which I desperately wanted to do, but all at the same time? I feel myself slipping back into an old pattern. Nothing is done well, everything is unfinished. P tells me that they are all more fulfilling things, things to ground me, but can I be honest with you? Apart from writing, I am unsure that I feel any more grounded and fulfilled at the moment. In some ways, I feel less fulfilled. I feel like it's all getting away from me. My mind still leaps from one idea to another and another. They are all good ideas-I am good at ideas. As my friend says 'Every one would make money, but there are far, far too many of them'. The things is, I feel compelled to follow each new one, leaving all the old ones half finished. It seems such a shame to squander them, but it leaves me feeling unfulfilled. This is very like the usual old me. What's nice to notice is that the ideas are there year round, they aren't dependent on my mood , as I used to think/feel.
Maybe the difference now is that all the ideas I have, I have for myself and my family, whereas before they were all concentrated on improving the lives of others. But I did feel fulfilled doing that, maybe it wasn't good for me, but it felt like it was. Maybe what I need to do, is see myself as someone in need of my help, and then go about helping myself. I used to have great success in helping others although I certainly used to feel awkward and unhappy when I had great plans and ideas on how to help people that I was subsequently not do because I needed to actually be in their company for inspiration to strike and the moment I left them, it left me.

So, peace alludes me when I fill my day up so. I can hardly even relax in the bath-my mind is busy all the time. Oh dear! I realise when I write this that it has always been thus, and that's what the meditation was for.
Thank goodness I'm a one-day-a-week Buddhist x