I'm not doing "mindful" today.
Updated: Feb 26
Nope. I'm not. Fuck it. And I say that .... erm ..... mindfully. Oh fuck.
I'm not though.
I'm a red flag on legs. I must practice mindfulness and living in the moment and breathing and emotional resilience and not over thinking every tiny detail and bla bla bla because if I don't I'm a bag of dicks. I really am.
But you know what, it's tiring. Keeping myself in check and being the best version of myself I can muster up from day to day, it gets very fucking draining.
Ironically every now and then, I have to live in the moment and stop ..... minddfully living in the moment in a healthy context and just cut loose and engage in some debauchery, which I know full well is not good for me.
It's an overthinkers snooker. But I'm not going to overthink that (yes I am).
This afternoon I'm going to press the fuck it button and fuck shit up. Fun shit. But I'm already engaged in self shaming guilt even before I've fucked any fun shit up.
So I've turned to my William Sieghart Poetry Pharmacy book for a pearl of wisdom in the shape of a poem. I'm prescribing myself a poem by Billy Collins called The Present.
It's quite amazing how a few powerful well formed eloquent words can cast in to sharp relief and clarity ones own noisy disjointed thinking. I needed another perspective and not one from family or friends.
This preface by William Sieghart and this poem by Billy Collins was just what the doctor ordered.
The preface:
The Poem:
The Present
By Billy Collins
Much has been said about being in the present. It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,like the latest club on the downtown scene,but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.
It doesn’t seem desirable or even possibleto wake up every morning and beginleaping from one second into the nextuntil you fall exhausted back into bed.
Plus, there’d be no pastwith so many scenes to savor and regret,and no future, the place you will diebut not before flying around with a jet-pack.
The trouble with the present isthat it’s always in a state of vanishing.Take the second it takes to endthis sentence with a period––already gone.
What about the moment that existsbetween banging your thumbwith a hammer and realizingyou are in a whole lot of pain?
What about the one that occursafter you hear the punch linebut before you get the joke?Is that where the wise men want us to live
in that intervening tick, the tiny slotthat occurs after you have spend hourssearching downtown for that new cluband just before you give up and head back home?
~From The Rain in Portugal: Poems
Let's go.
M.