Yesterday I woke up at 7:30 and tutored an adult student over Skype for 45 minutes. I drank a cup of coffee.
I made another cup of coffee and laid down on the bed in my studio apartment. I put a Phish video from their performance last night on the TV and played a video game about farming on my Nintendo Switch.
Dada abruptly unplugged the Phish video because she needed the laptop to work. I finished my coffee, made another cup, and continued gaming. I needed to mine more copper, ferment more beer, and feed the chickens. I put a podcast on (WTF with Marc Maron, interviewing filmmaker Gus Van Sant), to fill the audio-void and make my game-time meaningful. I drank the coffee.
I felt I should be writing some more articles for the website that hired me, but also felt I didn’t want to at the moment. I needed to recharge, I told myself. My head had been spinning all week from “tutoring,” to “writing,” to “teaching,” on an endless carousel of these three topics. The struggle of working from home being that you’re never really “home from work.”
After doing this all morning, I still didn’t feel recharged. My body felt tense. I felt vaguely guilty. I didn’t feel in the mood to read, and my coffee was crashing me. I needed a nap. I rolled over to nap and also focused on my tense body which felt oddly burned out. It’s not an uncommon feeling for me some days.
I drifted in and out of a light sleep, and focused more and more on my breathing. As I did this, my mind started to clear. My body readjusted and the muscles seemed to loosen. I just felt healthier throughout. The inspiration to do this was that I’ve been reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh this week. As a monk in Vietnam during the war, even in situations where his life or the lives of people he was working to save were threatened with an imminent deadline, he was able to practice mindfulness, and the solution would come to him. “If I can’t be at peace in the midst of a horrifically tense situation, then I can never truly be at peace,” he wrote, or something to that effect. I really buy into this idea of being calm in the midst of tense situations helping to bring the situations, and possible solutions, into perspective. I’m really sensitive to stress, which is why I’ve often run from responsibility.
Anyway, the point is that the breathing worked for me and I felt much better. Though I’ve tried on and off for years, that’s the first time I think I really hacked into a soothing “meditation.” It was cool. And that’s what prompted my previous blog entry and this one. They just came out of that.
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