Long Time

It feels like a long time since I’ve written a post, even though it’s only been since Monday. I’m not quite sure why that is. It may be because the last couple of days have seemed longer than usual or that I’m still unwinding from an unexpectedly intense weekend.

Walking back from picking up coffee this morning, I decided to get back to just rolling with it and write a post without any real plan behind it. What you’re reading now is the result of that decision.

Just writing this, I find it helpful to have the theme of “just rolling with it” to keep coming back to when I start to drift toward imposing a structure and plan on this blog. Letting myself just roll with it seems to give me space to breathe, unwind and unravel from tension, recenter, and recharge. It’s a release and a relief at the same time.

Walking outside this morning, I began thinking about how the blog was developing. One idea that came to mind is that I’m starting to use it to practice awareness. The type of awareness I’m talking about here is the same type of awareness that I’m learning about in Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, by Jon Kabot-Zinn.

As I was thinking about what I was writing, it began to occur to me that a lot of my writing so far has been written from a perspective of observing things in my life in a somewhat detached way, almost as a spectator. This is beginning to seem like one way of interpreting the concept of awareness.

Coming back to today’s post, I wasn’t sure what to write about initially, started writing and just let the ideas flow. Once I started to think about centering this blog around the theme of awareness, I found myself starting to lock-up, as a result of thinking about the perfect outline that would fit the topic, as the topic began to emerge for me through the writing. Now that I’ve abandoned that ideal for this post, it’s been easier to continue writing the post.

I do find myself constantly checking the word count and pushing myself to hit the 500 word mark. I’ve been trying to resist that urge and am having a harder time than usual today resisting it.

I’m starting to experience this entry starting to drift toward a bit more incoherence than I’m comfortable with right now. It could be that I’m still learning to just roll with it. As a result, I may drift back and forth between feeling too structured and too loose with the writing. Maybe my tolerance for the unstructure will begin to stretch and if I allow myself to just roll with it, may experience the benefits of it as a result. Just writing this I’m experiencing finding myself in a space that is unfamiliar and a bit uncomfortable. There could be a control element coming into play here as well, however that’s probably a whole new, yet related theme, for another time.

For now, it’s time to reign it back. Checking the word count, it looks like I exceed the 500 word goal after all.