Well, here I am again, banging out a blog entry in too little time because I have still not figured out when to do what given my new sleep regime.

Clearly, I have to stop leaving things till the last minute. But there is only so early I can do this blogging thing. I know from bitter experience that if I do my writing too early, then after a short period of feeling good about “having the rest of the day to myself”, I will become very depressed because now, the rest of the day has no purpose and I am just marking time till the next time I write.

And sure, I know that I could just keep writing, thousand words per day be damned. It might, even, be a good thing. Use the blogging as a warm-up exercise and then go (SFX record scratch!)

SOME TIME LATER

Or something else could happen. Namely, Joe appeared and told me we would be leaving in ten minutes. Once more, I completely forgot that we leave earlier than usual on BCSFA meeting nights so we can hit McDonald’s before the meeting.

So I had to pull myself together and make a decision, and I decided that, seeing as I was barely an eighth into my daily blogging, and very tired from my Zopiclone, I would do the McDonald’s but skip the meeting, and come back here, finish the writing, and then get some more sleep.

Of course, now that I am home again, I realize that I could have skipped McDonalds, finished my writing while toute la gang was eating, and then made the meeting. Which sounds a lot better, honestly. But I think my social anxiety was pushing buttons and pulling levers behind the scenes and causing me to make less than stellar decisions.

Face me, dammit.

I’m not even that sleepy now.

Oh well. I am trying very hard to purge myself of regret, second-guessing, and might-have-beens. Fuck it. Life offers many options but time is but a single track stretching between birth and death. You only get to ride this ride once, and no amount of regret or second-guessing will make every choice perfect and without flaw, so just make the best choice you can and move on. Live with the consequence, and stop trying to live in more than one timeline at a time. You are here now, and you will always be here now. Learn to be good at that.

I think that is part of the wisdom of the whole New Age “be here now” dictum. It is not a total abandonment of memory or forethought, that would be insane. It is more about developing one’s ability to enjoy the present moment and to truly savour it to the point where memory and forethought can be integrated back into the consciousness, creating a single fully integrated awareness that covers all three modes, past, present, and future, at the same time, smooth, powerful, and efficient.

A lot of the stress in our mind comes from handling the present while also dealing with the past and the future, both of which are imaginary modes. We remember the past kinda of like it is happening now, we imagine the future sort of as if it is happening now, and handling the switching between these two imaginary modes while also maintaining focus on what is currently happening, all the while making sure it is clear what is happening now and what is only our “dreaming” of past and future… all of this is a seriously large component of our cognitive load.

Especially for us modern humans, who live in a world with so many different layers of abstraction, of things which in some ways seem real but which are not, like pictures in a magazine, images on a television screen, fictional characters in the book we are reading, or even just the ideas and facts we heard about on the news. All of these abstract layers of meaning and representation have to be sorted and filed appropriately, and it puts a lot of stress on our poor overworked frontal lobes.

Then there is the issue of what in computer circles is called “garbage collection”. In dealing with the many layers and demands of modern life, we end up suppressing, delaying, or redirecting a lot of thoughts and impulses, and that leaves our minds cluttered with incomplete processes, half-completed thoughts, suppressed emotional potentials, and other detritus.

Thus, our mindscape grows ever more cluttered and weighed down by junk, and is forced to take more and more circuitous routes towards the necessary ends of the day, and if this goes on long enough and bad enough, the person’s mind becomes like a hoarder’s home, with just tiny paths of functionality, the bare minimum for bare existence, remaining.

And like a hoarder, the victim does not see their own clutter. To them, it has always been like that, and they do not see their part of the problem at all. They keep adding to their mental hoard, pushing all the things they cannot deal with onto it (which is a LOT of things) and burying themselves further and further under the massive pile.

There has to be a way out. Emotions do not disappear simply because they are pushed out of the conscious mind. Everybody needs an outlet, some way of emptying out the garbage and freeing up those mental resources for dealing with the here and now.

Me, I write. That is my outlet. That, and therapy. As therapy does an increasingly good job at reaching me and putting me in touch with my own emotional landscape, I find I have more and more than I have to work through and express. Stirring up old emotions and letting them loose is a wonderful thing to do once you have done it, but the doing it can be pretty rough.

And it can seem like chaos, like madness, like self-destruction. But if you keep going with it, you begin to feel the incredible joy of reclaiming parts of yourself and becoming more whole, and for that, you would walk through Hell blindfolded.

And I guess that is what spiritual growth is all about.