My addiction

So I didn't make it past Friday.

The excuse went this way.  It's too hard to wait to find out what's happening in the final episodes of this series I've been following (okay, it's Girls).  Maybe I can just make that the one thing that I watch. From that came the next episode of Episodes.  From that the end of Parenthood.  All good shows.  And that's what I keep telling myself.  These are all good shows. Shouldn't I be able to watch them?

To which I need to reply.  Yes these are all good shows, but shouldn't I be able to give them up?  These aren't real people and I'm encouraging my son to live a life comforted by entertainment, not comforted by friends and community.

Fresh start today.  I can't just abandon this.  So today I'm going to be on alert for the seductive reasons.

I'm going to go back to Pema Chodron's book on breaking old habits and I'm going to try again.

And I'm going to build new habits.  Primarily evening meditation sessions. How I spend my evenings impacts my day.  Deeply impacts my day. So I want to get back to evenings that are vital and rich with peace. Not drama.

Deep breath.  Once again.

future as addiction

My brain is addicted to the future, whether it's in a state of worry or a state of excitement, I am almost always thinking about life as something that will become worse or better than it is now.

Why can't I get addicted to the present? Because the present is nourishment, not addiction. So why am I not finding nourishment in the present?

I pause to do that and so much stress evaporates instantly. Who cares if Mme Fauteux wins this court case? I'll find an apartment somehow. Odds are I'll negotiate an extension at least until 2013. There's really nothing to panic about, other than mystress over winning or losing, which is really just ego.

It's easy to try and make a project out of liberating myself from my ego, but that's really, paradoxiacally just ego. Just more future when everything will be okay without ego. It's all abstraction without the action of actually being in the present, in this present, with this identity that I have now.

Sometimes the present can feel like an addiction. Sometimes I feel the jouissance, a sort of joyful subversive feeling when I'm not doing anything. It's a radical rebellion to the programming of tending to past and future.

My Addiction

So my plan to skip Prime Suspect didn't work. Not only that, but I ended up on some huge drama binge. Re-watch of Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, and then Law & Order Criminal Intent, up until 1 a.m. I didn't foresee the way the brain rears up when you try and change a deep routine. The anxiety of not sitting down to this ritual I've been doing since I met Ben's father, since I was sneaking out of bedtime to watch Starsky and Hutch--it felt like too much to bear. I need to find a way to reframe this hour so that I can use it to nurture my mind, not infeeble it.
This morning I went to my willow and thought about how powerful this journal has been for me. How it has been like a tree growing from the best of me. It's such a radical thing, in this urban civilization, to go stand next to a tree and not get down to whatever stressful job we have, first thing in the morning. I know I watch these dramas because they give me the stress of a workplace, which in some ways I miss. All the drama and gossip of a community of people. Turn that off and I feel like I'm staring into the void. But actually this is a great time for community on facebook, blogging, that community that I can take up at any time. A great time to send e-mails and be in touch with people. And to nurture my community in this home. Ben and I. My community of books. My community of thinkers, magazine writers, publishers. This is my community. I need it back.

A Plan

My concrete sense of Chi is growing every morning. I'm optimistic that peace and energy are flourishing in me and have a permanent home in this dawn routine.
But how to get this consciousness to flow into my day, instead of dissapating by evening? One of the tricks I've been using to create an antidote to self-hatred and depression has been the habit of countering every negative utterance with a positive cognitive action. "I hate myself" with "May I be happy, at peace, flourishing in inner well-being." I think it would be good idea to target some bad habits in the same way. For instance when I feel the urge to do some mindless internet surfing, I hold the ball for five minutes. That way I'm bringing little pockets of healthy energy into my life and cultivating a nurturing habit that will hopefully take over and tip the balance from negative habits to positive ones.

This will be especially helpful at those times of the day when I want to sit down and overeat in front of the computer.

Let's try it and see.