Throwback Wednesday. Here is another old one, this one from February 2014. I do have a few new things to say, we'll get to that eventually. There will be one more old one tomorrow, when it actually will be Throwback Thursday. :-)
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Many years ago, I discovered what I think of as the travel mindset. Getting packed and ready to go may be a frantic mess, but once you get to the airport and get in line to check in, you let all the travel anxiety go. You just insert yourself into the travel system and let the system take care of you.
Like everybody, I have some travel horror stories to tell, like the time I got stuck in Salt Lake City for three days while trying to get back home from a weekend trip to California. But horror stories aside, for the most part, you get where you need to go. You just have to have a good book (or three) and some food (granola bars, bag of nuts, etc), and you're set. Well, if you're me, you also have to have dramamine, but you get the idea.
We live far enough away from a major airport that pretty much any time we fly, it takes a full day to get to wherever we're going. I used to dread the travel days, because TRAVEL STRESS. But now I look at them as a completely acceptable, valid excuse to sit and read all day, and how often do I get to do that? Over the years, this has worked out so well that now the travel days are one of my favorite parts of vacation.
(Of course it helps that I'm not travelling with toddlers anymore. Thank the saints and all the stars.)
I've discovered that something similar works at the post office. Not always, because standing in line at the post office is right up there with filing financial documents and having dental work done in my list of things I hate with irrational hatred. But usually I can just relax and stand in line and not worry about how long it's taking. Sometimes I even chat with complete and utter strangers (like many introverts, I find it easier to make small talk with strangers than with people I know).
I'm finding as I play with this idea that those moments of calm can occur anywhere, anytime. I think of it as zen calm, but since I've never seriously undertaken zen discipline, it may not be very close. Zen-ish, then. In the midst of traffic, waiting to pick up the kid at school, any time I'm in a situation that is out of my control, if I just give in to it, let go of the need to be in control, I can reach a sort of calm stillness. (I typed clam stillness first, which is different, but I bet clams live a pretty zen life.)
I've never experienced true enlightenment. When I think of capital-E Enlightenment, Elizabeth Gilchrist's phrase from Eat Pray Love comes to mind: she says she was "catapulted into the lap of God." Although I didn't care for that book, that phrase stuck in my head. A moment of perfect bliss, feeling like you are connected to everything and everything is connected to you, suffused by light and love-- I've never been there.
But sometimes these little pockets of zen-ish calm at an airport or in the post office lead to a kind of enlargement of consciousness, a feeling of accessing something beyond myself. Especially when I'm reading. And those moments .... oh, let's just say they make up for a lot of other moments of confusion, fear, anguish, etc.
I typed that much on Friday. Then last night I had one of those other moments where I get tangled up in a load of crap. I sent an e-mail to a family group and got back a bunch of very sneering, negative vibes--which may have been real, or may have been my projection of things I've felt in the past. I started to panic about my new class, which starts tonight. I had a strange experience at the grocery store yesterday afternoon which didn't really register at the time but came back full force.
So there I was about 12:30 a.m. last night, letting myself get buried under a load of self-contempt and self-criticism. It's a hell of a lot harder to try to find zen-ish calm under those circumstances than it is while you're reading a book in the Denver airport. But I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, so I tried. And it helped. I don't think I got to zen calm, but I got back to the point where I could go to sleep.
Work in progress.
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