My neighbors to the North and to the East fight constantly. They are of a certain type, a type that has a mean - unhelpful slang name, who probably only recently graduated to renting a freestanding house of their own. They're fighting on the outside, with each other, because they're fighting a certain despair inside - alone. It annoys me because it disturbs my peace and makes the neighborhood freaking trashy. But more than that, it makes me sad. It makes me sad that they haven't figured out how to stop the cycle. They don't know how to step away. They don't know how to go within, to make different choices.I'm different. But, until recently, somewhat the same. In listening to a fight that escalated to the point of multiple neighbors in yards & many people calling the police, I had an epiphany. I think I'll call it a soft epiphany, actually. Because it wasn't all shining lights and metallic unicorns and unbearable lightness of being. It was simpler, and dirtier, and more deeply resounding than that. Maybe I'll call it earthy. It was the kind of epiphany that immediately comes with work. It's the kind of epiphany that makes you sorry you haven't been listening more closely all this time.
This is my blog, you might have noticed, and I'm going to use it. I'm going to use it to track the trajectory of this epiphany as it plays out in my life. The center of this epiphany is very complicated, but I can explain it rather simply, I think. There are about half a dozen things, all linked at the center, that I have needed to have in my life that - come hell or high water - I've not been able to install as regular habits. What they are is really unimportant as far as this post is concerned. The point is that these things, and their accessories, are the very essence of what it will take to make me happy when I'm on my deathbed. They are the blood and guts of what it really is to be the person I want to become.
I know for some people, the whole idea of conscious self development is foreign - even odious. "I like myself just the way I am," they will say. That's great. I like myself, too. I recognize the fits and starts, the lack of focus & intensity, the waiting, the procrastination, the not-knowing-how has all been part of a process. That process has been necessary, it's been fun, it's been productive of an immense amount of good in my life. I'm not down on myself. I'm not upset. I'm just ready, and have been becoming ready for the last 18 months or so, to move on. Move on from trying and arrive at simply getting it done.
Because of my nature, it's important to me to share this journey out into the world somehow. I think had I been born a couple of hundred years ago, I would have kept bound leather journals and when I was 80 or so, have published some kind of autobiography. That's what I feel like doing, on some level. That's the kind of person I am. I'm observant, especially internally, and I like to think that my observations are useful or at least entertaining. Now that we're in this age that requires a lower level of investment for, essentially, the same reward - I'm going the blogging route for now.
I'd like to write each day about how I did in my quest to move in the direction this epiphany commands me.
This blog has turned into chiefly a personal development blog. It's mostly a journal for myself and myself only, but sometimes has bits of information of interest to others - thus I've made it public. I do share random weirdness I find on the web, reflect on features of our shared existence, and so on.