2$ bottles!

Ok, so this is going to be one of those posts where I turn up Fever Ray pretty loud and just type whatever shit pops into my head. Entertaining? Possibly. More likely incoherent and non-consequential.

I had a great talk with a good friend of mine last night over some watery (but more importantly 2$) beers, and came to a bit of an epiphany about myself. Epiphany might be an incorrect word choice , but in the spirit of transcribing my thought stream I will use it anyway...

We were talking about some decisions I am in the middle of and I noticed a bit of a pattern in my personal history. Here it is in a nutshell:

I allow myself to get into a situation where there needs to be immediate action taken to prevent some sort of critical mass event, and so I limit my criteria to only the bare minimum required to avoid disaster. This in and of itself is not so much a bad thing. The problem happens when I choose to dedicate myself to that course; meaning that once the immediate problem or need is met, I choose to stay with that option without considering if it is the best long term solution for me. *I understand that I am being a bit nebulous here – hopefully this makes a marginal amount of sense.* I will then proceed to stay in a sub-optimal situation out of some bullshit sense of responsibility or commitment even though it ceases to be beneficial and sometimes long enough that it actually turns into a determent. This behavior has manifested in pretty much all areas of my life at one point or another for as long as I can remember. The interesting thing about seeing this pattern was that I honestly didn't choose to beat myself up about it. I was/am able to look at it and see it for what it is and know that I am able to choose weather or not I will continue the pattern, I realized on a very base level that I am not bound by my past. Pretty cool feeling if I do say so myself.

With that realization came the knowledge that the criteria I have been using as a base for life choices has been pretty skewed – any time we make decisions based on a sense of nostalgia for what a thing was or on our hope for what a thing could become we by default tend to ignore what a thing actually IS. As I posted the other day, I have been reading Tolle's book “The Power of Now”. For the record, the concept is sound. Be present. Give your undivided attention to what is happening at this moment. That isn't a license to ignore your past or future, it is the key to be able to consider the reality of both of those things while allowing you to be a slave to neither. As he says in the book, the past is the past. The future isn't here yet. The only time they have real meaning is the moment when they were/will be the now. It's pretty amazing how much clearer things become when they are looked at through that lens.

Alright. Drink is empty. Mind is cleared. You can all go back to shaking your heads at the rest of the internets now.