Not a long time.

But that’s not really true.

They say life is short, but it’s the longest thing you’ll ever do.

Anyhow, stop me if you’ve heard this one : I woke up with that song playing in my head and figured it made a decent enough jumping off point for today’s blogging.

Because its “live for the moment” philosophy is so alien to me. I am compulsively future oriented. To a fault, because it keeps me from embracing the moment I am in.

In fact, I hate to even be reminded of the moment I am in. I can’t handle life in realtime. There is too much going on all at once for me to process. I have to have my shield of icy intellectual detachment in place or I get overwhelmed.

But I know that despite the superficial air of pragmatic good sense that clings to the idea of being an ant instead of a grasshopper, like anything it can be taken too far and true Aristotelian wisdom can only be found somewhere between the extremes.

I am way too much of an ant. I need to move in a grasshopper-y direction.

To wit, I want to learn to simply relax, be comfortable in my own skin, and just be in the world. No media consumption, no distractions, nothing to keep my mind too full for me to remember to be neurotic.

Just sitting there in bare reality, calm and easy, knowing in my heart that I am perfectly safe, everything is reasonably okay, and nothing bad is going to happen if I turn off the hypervigilance machine and truly rest for a change.

That means that scared little animal inside can finally come home and curl up by the fire and get all the petting and love and affection he has wanted for so long.

It is all there waiting for him.

But like Jonny, he has to stop trying to escape first. He has to stop running. Stop seeing a predator in every shadow. Stop flinching at every sound louder than a whisper.

And that’s a tall order.

For he has been living the life of a hunted animal for so very, very long.

The real threat has been gone for 40 years. Any confirmation of my hunted status that remains with me is entirely delusional and self-referential and therefore means less than nothing in any objective sense.

I am safe. I know that I am. My life is, if anything, TOO safe.

So why is it so hard for me to believe it?

And I mean truly believe, deep down, in my heart. That’s where all the deep programming, the operating system level stuff, lies.

All the writing in the world is nothing but moving abstract symbols around like so many building blocks without the hard emotional work it takes to modify that code.

I’m working on it.

Writing my words in this space, at least, does help.

But I wish I could hack my source code and get it all done at once.

More after the break.,

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Just to catch you completely off guard…

….I am going to continue where I left off!

Feel free to take a break if you need to towel off your extremities.

The obvious reason I can’t believe in my own safety is that my entire psyche is structured around the feeling of danger and ways to flee it and if I truly believe I am safe,. a great deal of my mental house of cards will come a-tumblin’ down.

And by default, our psyches always act to preserve stability. And they will do whatever it takes to do so, up to and including falsifying facts and memories.

Remember that when you are wondering why some person can’t just change their mind when presented with the facts.

That might take such a radical shift in worldview that their minds would fall apart due to a lot of load-bearing assumptions having to be changed, and that is a hell of a lot to ask of someone just to make themselves less politically irritating to you.

And if you are still feeling smug, ask yourself this : when was the last time YOU made a change that big to your entire worldview?

Tangents aside, my point is that to believe I am safe would require a radical restructuring of most of my mind, and that’s kind of a big deal.

Ergo, I know that I am willing and I might even be ready,. but I don’t know if I am able to make the necessary changes to my mental landscape.

That’s why I wish I was capable of transformation. I know that what I need cannot be reached incrementally or gradually.

You can’t leap the chasm a little at a time. At some point you will have to cover the remaining distance in one big leap into the void with no idea where you will land.

And I don’t know how people are even capable of that. I can only assume that the trick is not think about it much.

This is why incautious and thoughtless people get much further in life than us careful and cautious types.

They are the baby birds that fly when kicked out of the nest.

We are the ones who die asking, “Wait, what happened? Where did the nest go? Why am I cold now? Should I be flapping? Wh… “/.

That’s why I can’t seem to escape the thought that needing and/or expecting the world to make sense is a curse.

Because what if what you need does not make sense to you at this time? What if the only way to make sense of things is to accept a lot of things that don’t make sense to you at all and won’t for a long time? What if the next step can’t be skipped and seemingly leads right off the edge of a cliff?

If you are me, you will be stuck on the edge of the cliff forever, unable to overcome my fears enough to take a single step away from what I already know.

That is what a complete lack of faith leads to. Faith is about so much than religion. The ability to believe in things not in evidence is vital to having a healthy, functional mind that does not get stopped by the first gap in logic it runs into.

Even the feeling that everything will be all right is beyond me.

Because how would you even know that? Let alone have the kind of power over time and space to make that come true?

You can’t. Nobody can. So kindly fuck off with that positivity crap.

You are trying to appeal to a part of me that simply does not exist. There is no part of me that “wants to believe”. That is looking for an excuse to let it feel good for no reason. That is shopping around for a new kind of delusion.

I don’t have any of that crap installed, okay? I am not claiming that is the right way to be, I am just telling you it’s how I am.

And that’s one of the many reasons I am so hard to help.

Because you don’t have to dig too deep before all my bitterness and rage comes gushing out like you just struck oil.

And who the hell is going to put up with that?

Hell, who could even survive it?

So I might as well get comfortable on the edge of this cliff.

Because I am going to be here forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.