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Jan. 28th, 2003 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iamomI've been placing a lot of quotations in my journal lately. In part, this is because whenever I sit to write something about my own experience, I find that no words are coming. I want to describe this experience of no-mind that I have, but its very nature prevents me from saying very much about it.
In practice, what's happening is that I'm using time as a physical construct according to my logistical needs of the moment. I think Tolle calls this "clock time." I might spend a few minutes out of every hour engaged in clock time; this is when I plan out my meals for the day, decide what I need to get done that day or week, or schedule any appointments, meetings or other tasks that I might have.
Apart from these moments, the rest of time is spent just being here, and mainly being with Z. She's a babbling crawling machine right now, so I have to watch where she is most of the time and I also enjoy getting down on the floor and playing with her. Several hours a day are passed like this, often including a walk with the dogs outside. Eventually, B comes home from work and I make our dinner. Sometime after dinner, I clean up the kitchen while B bathes Z and puts her to bed, and then after Z's in bed, I listen to B talk about her day, and I tell her stories about Z from that day. Then we go to bed, usually not much later than 9:30 or 10. We read a little before bed (right now I'm on my first reading of To Kill A Mockingbird, which I'm really enjoying -- I read Life of Pi last week, which was fantastic), and then we go to sleep. Once the lights are out, I'm usually asleep within 2 or 3 minutes. I wake up only when Z cries, and then I go and soothe her briefly, replace her pacifier, and go back to sleep myself.
It's an extremely simple life. Each moment unfolds very peacefully, and for weeks, I haven't found much of anything that gets stuck anywhere inside me. Days and weeks flow through me like water through a sieve, and as I said before, there's not much else to say about it.
And no, it's not boring in the least. If I had to qualify the experience, I'd say it was perfectly beautiful. It's characterized mainly by an utter acceptance of whatever is happening each moment, which in turn leads to an utterly friction-free passage of time. I have no idea if I'd be as peaceful if I was living in Afghanistan or if I had a more stressful job, but since neither of those scenarios apply to me, I'm not worried about it. I tend to think that I'd be essentially the same way, though. Unless I made some kind of conscious decision not to be.
In practice, what's happening is that I'm using time as a physical construct according to my logistical needs of the moment. I think Tolle calls this "clock time." I might spend a few minutes out of every hour engaged in clock time; this is when I plan out my meals for the day, decide what I need to get done that day or week, or schedule any appointments, meetings or other tasks that I might have.
Apart from these moments, the rest of time is spent just being here, and mainly being with Z. She's a babbling crawling machine right now, so I have to watch where she is most of the time and I also enjoy getting down on the floor and playing with her. Several hours a day are passed like this, often including a walk with the dogs outside. Eventually, B comes home from work and I make our dinner. Sometime after dinner, I clean up the kitchen while B bathes Z and puts her to bed, and then after Z's in bed, I listen to B talk about her day, and I tell her stories about Z from that day. Then we go to bed, usually not much later than 9:30 or 10. We read a little before bed (right now I'm on my first reading of To Kill A Mockingbird, which I'm really enjoying -- I read Life of Pi last week, which was fantastic), and then we go to sleep. Once the lights are out, I'm usually asleep within 2 or 3 minutes. I wake up only when Z cries, and then I go and soothe her briefly, replace her pacifier, and go back to sleep myself.
It's an extremely simple life. Each moment unfolds very peacefully, and for weeks, I haven't found much of anything that gets stuck anywhere inside me. Days and weeks flow through me like water through a sieve, and as I said before, there's not much else to say about it.
And no, it's not boring in the least. If I had to qualify the experience, I'd say it was perfectly beautiful. It's characterized mainly by an utter acceptance of whatever is happening each moment, which in turn leads to an utterly friction-free passage of time. I have no idea if I'd be as peaceful if I was living in Afghanistan or if I had a more stressful job, but since neither of those scenarios apply to me, I'm not worried about it. I tend to think that I'd be essentially the same way, though. Unless I made some kind of conscious decision not to be.
