Friday, March 25, 2022

 Friday, March 25, 2022

 

  I woke up around 3 am. This was a good night's sleep. I went to bed a little later than 10 pm to watch the end of a Brokenwood episode to see if the person I guessed 'did it' had. She had.  

    I should have gotten up and meditated but I couldn't motivate myself. Too bad. It would do me a world of good.   The house had been falling into chaos. Open boxes, dirty dishes, incompleted tasks galore.   Today was devoted to creating order and catching up on the updates.  

   On my morning walk, I saw a turkey sitting in the weeds. Strange. I checked her out and saw a chick. Then another. There was a total of seven freshly hatched. They were still wobbly on their feet. How many of these will make it to adulthood- one or two? 

   I had no idea where my time went.   Sometimes, I go down rabbit holes: Quora or FreeCell. But that's an hour at maximum. What happens to the rest of my day? Okay, yesterday was busy with activities, but that's not usually the case.

    I worked in twenty-minute sets today. I spent time in the yard off my bedroom cutting back the overgrown bougainvillea. It was good physical work. I enjoyed it. My mother loved working hard. I love physical effort too. I saw pushing and pulling on the tools and working with the weeds with all my might as a form of fighting. I put my shoulder into it. It felt great. Is fighting with people an extension of that? There is pleasure in opposition. I sawed through thick bougainvillea branches; I pulled out clumps of trailing corral; I cut down the large variety of heliconia in the backyard. It all felt wonderful.

      At 10 am, I had my weekly appointment with Shelly. I dealt with feelings of hatred and a need for revenge. I'd been reading High Conflict, which discussed polarized positions and their destructiveness.   I love being a loving person. I had that with Mike most of the time. I never experienced him as dangerous to my well-being for any length of time. He may have had more problems with me because of his background and because he married an excitable woman. He sometimes asked, "Are you a safe part of my environment?" It signaled that I was triggering him and had to tone down. Anger and hatred reside in all of us. 

   All emotions can serve both positive and negative functions.   Hatred at the boiling rage stage can't be good, but I see a positive function in its milder forms. Love is joining, bonding, and embracing. Hate is separating. In love states, we see ourselves as one. In hate states, we see ourselves as separate. Feeling that we are one with everything is a great feeling. But as long as we are in this human form, we also have to see ourselves as separate, with separate needs and separate points of view. Those who cannot accept that state wind up miserable or make others miserable. 

   I encountered a deep hatred state in myself once before. It scared the shit out of me. It was at the end of a Vipassana sit. In the few hours before we break the ten days of silence, we practice Metta, a meditation of loving-kindness. As the meditation session ended, I was hit with this rage. It was scary. Everyone else got up and walked out. I could hear people talking. I stayed seated. I was so angry I didn't even feel sane. I had visions of myself slinking along the walls and looking at everyone through paranoid eyes. I said, "Okay, God. You got me into the mess. Now, get me out of it." I heard the words. "You're just scared." That calmed me. I could live with fear. I sat with the fear for a while and then walked out to join my fellow meditators. I was normal. 

   The author of the book I was reading says that fear always underlies rage in the book. Rage is our response to fear. It's the fight mode in response to danger. All differences are dangerous 

at some level. It's all on a continuum.   I once read that human beings have a mild fear response even to the human voice. They compared that person's response to a dog's presence and to a human's voice. The person was calm in response to the dog and became anxious at the sound of the human voice. Our fear can be interpreted as excitement, of course.

   I gave more thought to adolescent D's struggle with reading failure. He fears negative judgment. We judge and are judged by standards. If we don't set a standard, there is no judgment. I don't particularly care if I win or lose FreeCell games. I have no investment. I enjoy the activity. I never judge my performance.   I do judge my indulgence, but not if I win or lose. I find FreeCell very relaxing.  

   Poor D is way behind his peers in his academics. I had no idea if there was something wrong with him or if he just had some bad habits. Mental habits can be debilitating. His hatred for himself because of his disability is a bad mental habit. It serves no positive function. If it drove him to work hard to overcome his problem, that would be one thing, but it doesn't. It had the opposite effect. It caused him to avoid doing activities that might fix the problem.

   While the gardeners were here, I tried out my new trimming tools. I asked if they would be willing to haul me up if I got down on my knees to clip back the smaller heliconia along the driveway. My new clippers worked like a charm. I could only stay down so long. My legs started to shake; they were not used to the exercise. 

   I heard Darby and Patrick talking as I walked passed their house. Darby came out to join me on my walk. We are both working on recovering our bodies. She had a stroke in 2019, and I have my leg problem and my spinal curvature. We compared notes. She also asked me if I had seen the nine baby turkeys. I only saw seven. She saw them hatch.