Monday, February 13, 2012

Can I accept my present as it is right now?

Messy kitchen. Economic uncertainty. My mother ill. Dripping toilet. Court case pending. Can I accept this?

I don't want to. I want instead to drift off into fantasies about starting a coding camp for kids, becoming a local celebrity on French radio, or how much better things might be if I changed my colour palette. I want to escape into nostalgia about Whitney Houston who died two days ago, at 48. She was born a week and a day after me. To think you can have beauty, talent, skill, wealth beyond your wildest dreams. You can sing the American anthem with such joy and freedom, better than anyone ever has and probably ever will. And still you can be so miserable and self destructive.

I have only a fraction of the things I wanted when I was twenty and Whitney Houston was just becoming a star. But today I'm alive. I have food. I am reasonaby healthy. I'm addicted to misery, maybe, but not really anymore to the things that cause misery. And today I have the wisdom to sit with this misery and watch it shift into peace, if I can keep my commitment to mindfulness.

As for the circumstances in my life. I can accept everything, except the debt. I can live with being forced to move, if it comes to that. My parents will die. As will I. I know I can get the kitchen together. But the debt. What am I going to do about that? That's something I need to sit with a bit.