Emptiness - Part II

Sunday 6/21/09

Yesterday, I touched my emptiness mindfully. That was in a coffeehouse relatively void of intelligent life and connection I imagine I would value. Today I sit in a polar opposite coffeehouse, albeit transient, the caffeine working and my body and mind rev. So there’s potential here. Hope of excitement, of meeting someone that will make the day a score as opposed to the day just being a score all by itself simply because I’m alive. I may be too hyper to drop down into the emptiness. Yet fortunately, from yesterday’s blogging, I’m aware of it. So okay, it’s not so much an inability but an unwillingness to drop down in the emptiness, into whatever state that is when I’m not ingesting something with my senses or fabricating a fantasy in order to fill me. If I then pull back on the gluttony of my senses and thoughts, I see that the “hope” of wholeness still lives – as nervous caffeinated energy coursing through my body. Interesting how its sensations are an exaggeration of what my other gluttonies bring about, how it changes my set-points, so that when the caffeine leaves, especially when it leaves quickly, I crash: even the other gluttonies may not work.

What’s left for me to do? A surrender to it as I said yesterday. Sometimes falling asleep with someone feels like that. Like I must compel myself to slow down, stop doing, stop and just melt into someone else and sleep.

And what if I’m not sleepy? Well that’s where I have less experience. I think I blogged, or should have blogged, about finding that at times, recently, when I slowed down I found myself more fully connected with myself and surroundings. The gestures and movements of others seemed exaggerated and momentary acknowledgments with others seemed suspended in slow-motion. On the one hand, this might seem like another gluttony – of the senses – but there’s a difference. It’s not a reaching for things to shove into my system. It’s simply connecting more fully to what is. It may be a most natural state in the absence of a multitasking, high-speed life in general, and me for my own neurotic reasons avoiding being present in particular.

Given my connectedness in this state, I wonder if it was something I never previously experienced. If that’s the case, I may have some work in therapy to learn why I didn’t just emerge into what was my, anyone’s, birthright. If I ever had experienced it, then I want to know what led me astray. For one, did I get pulled into another state which held me hostage thereafter? Or was it something that occurred in that state that compelled me to leave the state. Imagine that. Something that made being fully connected to experience not a good thing.

Anyway, yes, having an inquiring mind I want to know these things yet at this stage of my journey I will not wait for answers to come in their own time. That is, they will come in their own time and that’s okay. Yet I will be doing other work, meanwhile. And that is to – as I said in earlier blogging, slow down. And now what I add to that is: slow down, even if it means spending time in emptiness, even if it means revisiting something that once made slowing down and being present not okay.