Regression

Lessons that should become easier with time are frustratingly difficult to learn.

Eigenzeit indeed. It takes so little for the conviction that taking control of one's own time is important to be bulldozed by an army of opposing forces: things that scream to be done, and the belief (deep somewhere in my bones) that to stand in the way of these demands is selfish, childish and unrealistic.

Until something takes over my body and my soul and demands that I stop.

My father says that I have such a poor memory because I don't look back. "She lives in the here and now," says he. I wish it were so. The ugly truth is that I don't remember anything because I'm never really present when things happen. I'm in the future. Planning, obsessing, worrying, strategizing. It seems like a harmless enough game, but that's an illusion.

I woke up yesterday and realized that it had probably been days since I had taken a deep breath. One of the symptoms of living in the future: forgetting that your body can't leave the present. And the first thing that happens when I breathe deep is that I cry. For absolutely no reason. Nothing is terribly wrong. Many things are amazingly right.

Those people for whom mindfulness is a way of life: how do they get there? Were they closer to start with than the rest of us? Is their will so much stronger? Do they trust more?

All of that self-discipline that's lavished on the to-do list needs to be redirected.