Autumn Chill

[This is what it felt like when I got out of bed today]

Today was the second day in the "new" clock time after the yearly end of Daylight Savings Time. I think "Fall Back" really means "Fall back into bed after silencing your alarm because your body still thinks it's an hour earlier and it happens to be really cold outside."

But that's just lazy and ungrateful thinking, so I put it aside and appreciated having a place to sleep indoors (even if poorly heated) and a blanket to make me more comfortable. And food, and generally good health, and the ability to feel and experience things, even things I may sometimes judge as good or bad (or non-judge as neutral).

It may have been in the mid-twenties at sunrise this morning, but a cold fall sunrise had its own beauty. While I was having my simple breakfast, the following song started playing. I am not sure I have heard of the artist before, but the music blended with the view outside and the temperature to create an interesting experience/perspective:




A kind of long view perspective, not in images or words but more of a felt thing. It's fascinating to me how the mind puts different elements together like that to create and also subtly influence our sense of reality.

Whatever my own problems, there are others who are suffering more than I am and beyond just the immediate suffering there are elements being put into place today that will determine how many and who will survive and thrive or flail and fail in the immediate and long term of our particular societies as well as our emerging global civilization.

Remembering this isn't at all about never having fun and being a dour scold or fusspot. But being grateful at the start of the day, remembering how quickly we judge and shape our experiences reflexively and often without realizing we are doing it, and considering that each of us can make choices that will have real impacts on our own quality of life and that of others, now and in the future, isn't about pessimism or a grim sense of duty or obligation.

It is a chance to recognize what we can do this day, to have the motivation to do it, and having made that resolve or actually having carried out our action, to be able to appreciate everything else without tension or unease. It is a realization that we do have the ability to make things better and also that everything doesn't depend on any one person doing it all.

I know, I know, it sounds like some lame motivational speech like the kind of stuff that floats around social media like stale platitudinal flotsam. That wasn't what I was going for. Really. Honest. It just kind of came out that way.

Yet it is true. I think we might feel better living in a more conscious way where we make the best of each day, appreciate it for what it is and offers, and make thoughtful choices based on those options. And to recognize that we often have more options than our habitual conditioning allows us to perceive.

But here is something you don't often get in those half-hearted faux-tivational blog posts and speeches. I am terrible at actually doing any of the things I just wrote about. I really, truly don't do it most of the time. Either I don't think of it because I am distracted by my routine unthinking or I just don't feel up to "appreciating" whatever it is that I can perceive that the day is offering. That's likely because I am having some self-centered tunnel vision.

There is a reason why gratitude and waking up to your life's blinders involves practice, whether religious or secular in description. Making it all out as being cheery and optimistic can be anathema to someone who is in an emotional or mental stupor, or worse, who has succumb to anxiety or depression. And while the goal may be to embrace and appreciate all things, there's nothing wrong with starting off with one or two things for a month or twelve.

I see I am rambling again, so I will violate all the official and unofficial advice on how to write a "successful" blog post and just stop writing at this very spot.

An autumn leaf

[A featured picture on Pixabay. Lovely.]

There, you see? Back again already.

I'm sure you are familiar with reflection exercises like "Imagine you only had a limited time to live." They are very popular in post-modern societies and especially on blogs and in self-help books and videos.

Not that I claim to be very knowledge about self-help genre. I've looked into it and it tends to be the same thing recycled over and over by a few very successful people and hundreds of folks who want to have that same success. Which is why you see the successful and not so successful self-help advisors pop up in places like the Huffington Post.

Well, anyway, there's that one, and the one about what you would do if time, money, and other resources were no object. And I've noticed a couple of things.

One, I don't seem to do well with these little exercises. I just don't know what I would want to do or I can't decide from the options. Anything I pick would just be to complete the exercise, not because it was the thing.

Two, it's very hard to actually imagine yourself to really be in such a life-and-death or inconceivable abundance scenario. Sure, it's possible in a kind of superficial, light and breezy "Oh I'd go to [insert exotic location]" kind of way. But not really.

I mean, would you really see a shift in your priorities? Would it really crystallize what you think and believe? Reveal how you really feel?

So then today, little less than two weeks before my birthday, I go into to get a basic test done as a follow-up to my annual physical. Something was a little off in the physical, so it was just being  a matter of cautious.

That is, until my doctor calls me from her house the same day to tell me I have a serious condition that is one hundred percent fatal if left untreated. Hence I will require major surgery in the near future, which itself is kind of risky.

I ought, therefore, to have some of that clarity coming my way since I am facing an immanent mortal threat. Nothing so far, though. Not about life, spirituality, where I would go or what I would do if it was now or never. Still, maybe it will come to me as events unfold and my situation becomes more real to me.

I'll keep you updated if any insights reveal themselves.

Be well.