Still For What?

I don't feel good.  I'm dying inside.  I don't like this feeling of fatigue and raw exhaustion. Every so often I get angry too.  I got mad at my daughter last night when she said she was going to go live with my elder sister.  I told her not to come back home when I fixed the air conditioner.  I don't think it was so much her going to stay over there as it is she lied about it when I asked her.  "I don't know", she said.  I knew that she was not telling the truth. I felt a little betrayed.  It is so typical of the family that I grew up in.  All of my buttons went in and I told her to stay over there and when I got enough money to fix the air conditioner that she couldn't come back home.

She's twenty five.  She can do what she wants.  I was wrong.

To say that I'm unhappy is an understatement.  Miserable is what I am.  I hate working for this company and I want to move on but am finding it absolutely difficult to move on.  When I passed in my resignation, they held on to my legs and begged me not to go.  I conceded, I regret it.  I need to leave that place.  As long as I'm there I feel bogged and weighed down.  The job is not that hard.  I have allowed everyone to heap their baggage on me. It sucks.

What do I do?  I'm still now.  It does not feel peaceful or good.  As long as I'm on the move, I can't feel anything.  That's what has kept me there.  My job is a dark cloud hanging over my head, raining acid and eating away at my core. My boss doesn't get it. I don't get it.  Who in their right mind would stay still for that?

How can I get mad at my daughter for betraying me, when I keep lying to myself? 

THINK about it.

I Am Still (A Little)

I am still- a little.  I can be still if I want to at will.  I have to focus on myself and forget everyone else. Focus is the key word here.  Anxiety comes when I think about what everyone else needs or how I want the world to be or I enumerate my troubles and worries.  When I think about needing to lose weight or how I'm going to try to fix the upstairs air conditioner or when I think about how diabolical and hateful people are.  When I realize that I cannot eat all of the sugar or drink all of the coffee that I want or can't travel  he world over or keep my house clean.  Or when I realize that God want's me all to himself...

That last one really scares me (Better he than the devil).

More than anything else, when I realize how far away I am from being who I want to be. Well maybe I'm exaggerating- probably not that far.  (I'm a little depressed today I guess, but I can be still).  I don't have to jiggle all over the place emotionally or try to solve all of my problems today, or trying to adjust myself to someone else's liking.( am I a sucker or what)?  ( I do need to go to the pharmacy and pick up some medication that I should have picked up a few days ago though).  It's not like I don't have resources.  I have people knocking at my door asking me to work... but I don't want to.  So, what do I want to do?

Be still.

Still a Gift

If stillness is a gift, that means I can't grab it off of the shelf anytime I want to...I have to wait for it. Someone has to give it too me. Obstacles assault my reception...lack of acceptance of my powerlessness, lack of surrender,  lack of patience.  I wanted to hurry up and be still. To calm the emotional pain and fear.  Stillness is beginning to come to me, periodically for short periods of time.  It is a hard to describe.  The calm of still that I feel is nothing like I've ever felt before.  To be perfectly still is to access a portion of my being that seemed inaccessible.  Still...serenity is present within the stillness, it is like floating on water on my back in a pool and even though you see nothing, you are conscious of everything.  Glimpses of stillness...

I'm not sure that I'm supposed to think of these things.  If I were completely still all of the time, I am sure that my heart rate and respirations would slow to an almost undetectable rate.

I'm tired.

Still?

I'm growing impatient with this stillness project. It shows, though, how little control that we as human beings have...over anything.  I can be still...make a decision, not to decide.  Hold everything in my life that's external in cue...but it's the internal stillness that I crave.  The quiet peacefulness, that allows me to see the world through the Creators eyes, not just my own and to get closer to God.  Why do I want this?

Because I know that my own efforts to guide and live my life are inadequate and inefficient.  Storms in my life don't just come, I tend to unwittingly create them.  Some peoples storms just happen, like when someone gets sick or robbed or someone's house burns down, but I tend to orchestrate mine. The disorder in my life...all the way round.  The conflict with wanting to change careers (actually that is an unexpected storm).  The marriages that I didn't have or thought I had. I have often struggled to control the events in my life. Only to find that the more I try to control, the further control of my life seems to spiral out of reach.

Right now,  today is the worst that I can remember my life being.  My finances, my house, my job, my lack of career satisfaction.  I say that I want to be happy...but what is happiness...really?  I have to be still.  Because, if I keep moving, the mountain of chaos that is my life will come tumbling down on me, crushing and smothering me in it's ruins.

Anxiety begins to greet me each morning staring at me with this big grin on it's face.  It reminds me of that song by Billy Holiday "Good Morning Heartache". Except I don't invite it to sit down...I try to ignore it until it disappears.

I will wait for stillness.  I will wait...In order to wait though I have to increase my capacity to be patient). I thought of stillness as a place to hide at first but it is not a place to hide, it is a place to become visible. (Not sure I understand that paradox).I have experienced small episodes of stillness within the past couple of days, (minutes and even seconds) and I think I know what heaven is like.  But, I have to wait for this gift.  It's difficult but what else can I do?

Except be still. Externally still until...

But Still

I can't continue to work like this. When I say that what do I mean?  I can't continue to bouncing off of walls like this.  I can't continue to work seemingly purposeely. Ican't continue to wander aimlessly through life...doing the same thing over and over and over again and expect different results.  I can't continue to expend my energy and not replenish my energy. 

So, if I can't continue to work like this, how can I continue to work?

I don't know.  That's where quiet, or stillness comes in.  I guess it will come to me.  I don't have the psychic capacity to figure anything out or go with the flow. I'm waiting to hear from the depths of my core and it spits out these   That's where stillness comes in.  I had an experience of stillness yesterday that helped me to understand where my anxiety comes from. I'd had insominia for three nights.

I realize that anxiety comes from deep down inside.  It is triggered by external events.  It's already there.  It takes something external to draw it out.  I can control it. I used to think that I was required to be afraid of any and everything.  Now I know that I'm not required to be afraid of anything. 

Stillness.  I had insomnia and made myself sleep... I think that the thought of being still surrendering frightened me because a part of me thinks that I controls things.  Maybe, it's the little girl part that was made to responsible or blamed for things beyond her control . I don't know.  The things that I should be responsible for I am not responsible for because I'm so busy being responsible for everyone and everything else.  No one asks me to do those things. 

The still life.

I Am Still

I'm not struggling to become still anymore.  I have become still for a few minutes. A haunting still  greeted me this morning when I opened my eyes. A perception of stillness as a negative event, a bad omen or an unwillingness to do anything worthwhile had taken hold.  I often stilled myself out of anger or emotional angst, frustration.  I have used stillness as a weapon out of a need to avenge myself and make people wonder, to confuse. My motives for desiring stillness have changed. I need stillness, I'm not sure why. I just know that I need it. Initially,  I thought "I can accomplish more in stillness, than I can in motion".

But stillness is not about accomplishment.  It just is. And I just need to be.
I'm still a little afraid. As my quest for stillness continues.  I will honor, cherish, savor it.

I  have to remember that it's a gift.  I know that I have forgotten, when I decide what my endpoint will be.   God cannot work on me if I'm running to and fro.  Miracles take place when you're in motion, but if you are moving too fast or too much, they are hard to recognize. So I have to be still....He decides the endpoint.

Still.  I'm a little afraid. It is like fasting from the madness of life .  I've had a steady diet of chaos for the past 52 years of my life.  I need a mental a spiritual vacay.  I sit on the shores of stillness and calm myself as I watch the tide advance and recede.  The gentle cradling of the water and consistent of rhythm of the water swaying back and forth are like a lullaby...they sing me to sleep.

Still...I feel a sadness as I wave goodbye to all those washed out to sea by the demands of a material  that is determined to compete with God. .  I sometimes wonder why it is like that.  Joy sits right in front of us for the taking, yet we so frequently and unknowingly choose misery. Not for ourselves, but for others.  I am on a new path.

I unwillingly visited the doctors office yesterday and I received antibiotics for a sinus infection.  I don't feel well still.  I havent' started the antibiotics either..  When I think of the parts of my life that I have ignored in favor of other things, I begin to wonder what I was thinking.  Or whether I thought at all. How could I have sacrificed myself to so many people, places and things and have nothing to show for it?  I'm tired.  I want to rest but with this job there is no rest.  Now what?  I can't continue to work like this. 

I think...I will continue to be still.

Awakening to Still

It makes no sense to cater to the desires of a world that is blind and has no insights.  Yet, I do it everyday.  My job,  the stores,  modern trends, opinions, politics.  I woke up still this morning, the amazing thing is that my desiet upre to resist the stillness was very strong.  Thursdays, we have meetings at work about the patients.  Not much is really discussed, but I am often called on the phone, to make sure that I dial in.

I set my alarm clock  for 8 am this morning so that I could get up and dial in.  I don't feel well so when my clock alarmed, I got up, shut it off and lay back down for a few minutes.  When I opened my eyes, two hours had passed and the enthusiasm that I thought I'd have from sleeping for a couple of more minutes had not appeared either.  But, in it's place was a sense of peace and I found myself having to choose between savoring that sense of peace and running downstairs, grabbing a cup of coffee( coffee is a real peace breaker) and dialing in to the meeting--hich my contributions are often minimized, non-existent or ignored.  I chose to savor the peace (with guilt and a dysfunctional sense of responsibility trying to nuzzle their way in)

Stillness is not only a way of being, but it is a sense of being. A sense of being that I have rarely if ever experienced before.

Whatever the external consequences of resisting the biddings the world, the internal benefits outweigh them.
Catering to the bidding of my soul takes courage, time and discipline.  The world is averse to peace and stillness and that's too bad.  It doesn't know what it's missing.

I look forward to more stillness...Still.

Stiller

I am ill.  I realized that when I came home yesterday and passed out on the couch for 4 hours against my will. When I awakened, the couch and I were soaked.  I felt like I had gone swimming and didn't dry off when I got out of the pool. I am weak, my legs and chest hurt.  I have no more physical energy. I haven't much of a choice but to be still. ( I won't call my little sister who was sick this weekend and try to tell her what to do. She recently got out of the hospital and was shopping for shoes for my nine year son at Payless when I called her yesterday.  Ay-yi-yi!)

Yesterday, I went to work and I felt horrible while I was working.  On the drive home I kept swerving and I couldn't figure out why. I was dizzy. It's amazing how much of your bodies messages you can ignore.  I've seen people run past themselves right into the grave.  Ignoring all signs and signals of a sick body until the body screamed for attention and then it was too late to answer...no time to mend broken fences, no time to fulfill unfulfilled dreams, no time left.

I'm praying, not to go out like that.  I am still in the process of being still  I have enlisted the help of the Divine, but the final decision belongs to him.  I think that we need times of stillness to stay in contact with God and ourselves.   I lose myself and am constantly rushing past myself and my Higher Power, to do other things. Realizing that my actions are futile without Divine help.  So, still... 

Stillness, would give me a break from the chaos, internal and external, it would keep me in contact with the One who matters most.  And it would give me some insight into my life's instructions.  I already have some insight but I have to work on acceptance.  In stillness, I can focus on accepting my mission.  It's scary. It's more scary when you doubt. That's why I want to be still.  I'm exhausted from expending my own energy through my own will.

Still.

Still Not Still

Stillness is a gift, not a priviledge.  I am learning that the hard way. Not able to still myself, I decided that I would wait for stillness to come, like sleep during the night.  I can feel it waiting in the wings...but what is it waiting for?  Maybe, for a change in my attitude, my motive.  Maybe it's waiting for me to surrender my will more completely, or waiting for me to develop a greater sense of patience rather than harried and harangued urgency at every opportuintiy.  Maybe it's just not time.

I will wait as long as I have to. Previously,  unbeknownst to me this is a process.  The process of becoming still. A process of becoming...still I always thought that I could grab stillness at will. Like a can of soup when I 'm hungry or a glass of water when I'm thirsty...but it's not that way.  Spiritual hunger and thirst has to have a clear path, I guess.  I don't know.  I felt a small bit of stillness today as I was falling asleep on the couch. It was familiar but I forget now what it felt like.  But, I know for a moment I was still. blo
I just continue to sit and wait and watch and blog and take naps until I can recognize still, touch it, describe it. 
Struggling to be still is an oxymoron, that's what I've done in the past.  Struggling defeats the purpose, defeats the process.  I have often thought that not struggling, was being still but it's only not struggling.  I have struggle d throughout my life.  I thought that that was what was required to survive.  Not sure, I ever knew what was required to actually live.  So, I continued to struggle.  If I stop struggling, I'm sure that I will be closer to stillness, but I won't be there yet.

I'll wait.

Still Not...

I'm tired after working a long weekend.  It was only two days...but it seemed like the longest two days of my life.  My back hurts, my body hurts...I ate too much sugar over the weekend,  and drank too much caffeine.  The funny thing is...since I started this stillness experiment,  when I eat, I seem to get fuller faster.  I don't know if it's my imagination or not yet.  But, last night I didn't binge myself like I do when I don't eat all day.  I didn't eat all day yesterday. I didn't want to stop and I was speeding past myself. 

Speeding past myself, is how I have lived for the past 50 years.  The first two were steeped is self-exploration. Maybe the first three.  Anyhoo.  I've done stillness projects before and I could just shut everything out.  But, I can't seem by sheer will just do that now.  I'm not sure why but suspect that it's because I have allowed any and everything to shake me up for so long it's hard to stop moving around.  It's like the world is an earthquake and I'm in the center of it going along for the ride. 

When I used to make myself still it was a resentful, angry type of still sort of like when a baby clamps his lips together to keep you from spooning food in its mouth.  That's the best way that I can describe it.  But, that's how I would keep chaos from making me crazy, I'd just shut down initially accidently but then on purpose.  And now I want to shut down, and I can't, because I have surrendered, my abilities as many as I can to God.

Maybe it's not time. 

I know that my patience meter is about 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.  I didn't realize how impatient I can be until I started this. Now I see.  It's amazing how much of ourselves elude us during a lifetime. ( I think about this when I think about Lois...my best buddy. But, that's another blog post.).

I rememeber a time when I thought that everything was just cut and dry.  It's gone...that time.  Thank God!
I'll just wait for the gift of stillness.  I never thought of it as a gift before.  I always thought of it as a tool.

Wow!

Stiller

I'd like to be quiet.  As quiet inside as I can.  But I'm still interpreting what quietness is, means.  Mystic people call it quietude.  Is that the same that as attitude? Pulcritude? Latitude? Longitude? Maybe...I could call it stillitude. I had to look up the suffix tude...and the definition was state, quality or condition. I started my stillness project again yesterday.   I still have a long way to go.  I am not sure how far I'll get because, when I started doing this a month ago, it only lasted seven days.  I still want to try at though , just to see if I emerge a calmer quieter, more patient stiller person. Shielding myself from the aggravation of the small things in life and being able to face more openly , the big things in life.


But I have many questions in my head still.  What exactly is stillness? Internal stillness?  Is it quieting you thoughts? Is it abstaining from making life changing decisions? I kind of know where stillness is supposed to take me, but I can't really tell what the vehicle that I'm supposed to be riding in looks like? I just know where I want to go.

The Still

I've decided to do a project where I will blog for thirty days straight on being quiet and still and see what I gain...or not.  I mean being inwardly quiet and still  not making snap decisions and not impulsively reacting to every threat that the world brings.  I am OMG'ing myself into an early grave.  Wake up call #1 here recently has been my little sister, my youngest sister...the baby of the family having a spontaneous pneumothorax while trying to run the world.  The One who really runs the world has strongly suggested that my sister take a break while He handles thing.  A badly needed break.

I've had to take breaks from running the world.  I finally quit one day when I realized that I couldn;t prevent the tsunami's, earthquakes and global warming that are constantly shaking things up.  I couldn't prevent the suffering from those disasters either so I figured that I'd let go.  I wasn't doing that good a job anyway. 

One thing that I noticed is that, while I was always buisy, I never seemed to accomplish much and the things that were my responsibility to handle most often went undone.  So while I tried to wish away the disasters of the world, I was creating my own internal disasters, and I realized that with my own internal ruins piling atop one another...I am absolutely useless to myself or anyone else.

So, I sit still, looking deep down into the rabbit hole of my internal being and becoming familiar with what's contained, housed there.  Scary prospect, but the external distractions of life and society more often than not leave many of us staring in the mirrors at strangers. 

I've discovered by default that the most frightening existence in life is one devoid of self knowledge.  I have to be still and quiet so I can familiarize myself with the rhythm of my heartbeat.  That to me is a life still...worth living.

I Reach For Calm

Some mornings I reach for calm and calm eludes me.  I don't know why. It's almost as if I wake up choosing to dance to rhythm of the beat of the world or the beat of my heart.  I think that when I was much younger, I had that energy to dance to both. It appears now that I'm older and beginning to realize that my time here on earth is going to start winding down at some point,  I don't have the energy to dance to both, so I have to choose.  I have danced mostly to the worlds music, which begins to become monotonous at best and plain tedious and boring at worse.  I want to do something other that what I have been doing.  Change course, outlook and just plain old enjoy life...I think that that God put us here for.

The thing about it is that you have more naysayers coming at you when you decide to forge your own path...How you gonna do that? You have to work and pay the bills? Must be nice....Are you rich?
That last one I can answer.  Heck, yeah  am.  We all are.  We just spend so much time trying to achieve goals conceived and rubber stamped by society that most of us don't count or value the riches that we have right there in front of us. 
Heck yeah...I'm rich in love, ideas and creativity.  The world is a big wonderous play ground  and I've been dying to get out there on the jungle gym like I did years ago.  Hoist my knees up over the bars and hang myself upside down so that I can see the world from a different view hang my hands down over my head and continue to reach for calm.

How I'm going to do it.  I don't know.  I just know that I am

A Mean World

I'm perplexed at the lengths that human beings go through to degrade, demean and oppress one another when life would be so much easier if people would love one another.  Love is so much sweeter and flexible than hate.  Yet we choose hate time and time again to lead us to the depths of despair that we know as life.  I look at postings on facebook and twitter. People post words all of the time, but do the really understand the magnitude of what they are saying?  It seems that in modern day time, we are a bunch of cowards parading our bravado in empty words to strangers on the net that can only put a name to an avatar or picture (neither of which may be true). We are going backwards. People began communication by writing by chiseling symbols on cave walls.  We chisel symbols on our laptop screens, but our ability to communicate is decreasing.
How do we teach our children to live in a world where everything is disengenuous and virual rather than genuine and concrete,
And how do people miss the lessons that the past have so diligently and blatantly taught us.
I know I'm talking in general here but these are just morning thoughts after a day of hard work and an evening of mild to moderate partying and fire works, on a fourth of July evening.
I love life and everyone in it.  People who work hard to make others feel "less than",  do it because they feel "less than".  It's hard to see with all of the makeup and fanfare and media and money.  But it is there... up close and personal. if they would only look into the camera lenses and recognize who is staring back at them...Maybe, they would begin to understand the magnitude of the despair that they are working so hard to spread, and then start on the road to becoming happier people.

Vicarious

When I heard someone say, You can only be as happy as your unhappiest child, it brought me nose to nose with the vicariousness in which we parents unspeakably live our lives.  Raising children is more often than i admit wrought with unspoken expectations of perfection and ultimate illusional control, with I have unknowingly saddled my children with` knowing that not I nor any other human being will ever achieve.

My heart bleeds for my unhappiest child and when i look in his eyes, I see more of my past self, youth than I do of his.  I had trouble remembering as he approached his 21st birthday, that though he came from me, resembles me (mentally and emotionally and spiritualy) at that age, he is not me. Though I hate to admit it, he is a separate person from me. Entitled to ive his life in whatever way he chooses and also prone to making mistakes--just the way that I consistently and often vehemently reminded my mother and when I was a young girl.

The similarities are that I was very rageful and defensive.  Just like he is.
I had extremely low self esteem--I declared myself a certified mysogenist, which I thought was cool--just like my son...(Until I later discovered that I was included in humanity. Feeling kind of defeated  just decided to admit I hated myself too-- for some reason it didn't bother me back then). I was arrogant --just like my son.  I felt that having a high IQ made me smarter than everyone else--and entitled to consider but disregard anyone else's opinions or feelings everyone was else unworthy to be in my company ( those were some of the loneliest years of my life--.just like my son). I didn't know that I was miserable at the time and thought that that was how life just happened--to be. Hell, just like my son.

And then, I started to grow up.

What I've learned since then is that you have to work at life, it doesn't happen to you. We do and always have happened to life. I can be as happy as I want to be.  It took me a long time to realize that I could choose happiness.  It is taking my a lifetime to discover HOW to choose happiness.

I don't have to bask in the indefinite oil spill of misery and haphazard process ultimate self discovery that my son is going through.  That is his process.  I've had my own time to do that.  I can only help him navigate his way through life's disasters, if he will allow me to..  One of the most difficult things about parental vicariousness is understanding that our children are and have always been separate human beings. I don't believe that the purpose of raising children is to make them the sacrificial lambs, to cleanse of all our past msitakes.

The life that some parents claim that they give to their children, ibelongs indeed, to their children. I have to admit, that I sometimes have difficulty remembering this. I also have difficulty remembering that: I am different from my son.  I am female-unlike my son. I am 52 unlike my son.  I have a career-unlike my son. I grew up in a two parent household -unlike my son. I've raised three children-including my son.

Our journeys may be inexorably linked as parent and child,  but not our destinies. He is
entitled to his own life, his own mistakes, his own misery, his own happiness. I confidently wait for the day when he makes his best choices on his own behalf. As, I have struggled  to learn to do.
.