sunday morning

out of all the nails, the most exasperating to grow is the thumb. if you’re a nail grower by aspiring trade, you understand well that nails seem pitifully short until some indiscriminate length that they seem acceptably long.

you also probably understand, then, that the more you don’t think about it–the less you think about it?–the faster they grow.

this morning, i’m drinking hot things – rooibos tea, chicken broth. i don’t even know what rooibos tea is. i’m also considering time – the slowness of it, the quickness, the passage, the ignorance, the wasting, the welcoming of it. the spending and buying of it, the observation of it and the being in it. having love/hate relationships with everything makes sense, as we live in the world and the world is one of polarities, though ideally, i prefer the middle way, if i can make it there.

if at the end of the day, i don’t wish to have changed a moment of how i spent it, i’d consider it a success. but if i find myself longing to have done differently, well, the gentle noticing of that makes it a success, too.

i’m remembering again, perhaps from lifetimes past, how powerful my outer words and my inner thoughts are, and how they really can shift my reality.

take surfing, for example. it’s been a journey, riding waves (pun intended and not) of the alternation between fear and fun. in this moment, i’m neither here nor there, which is perfectly fine with me. there is no push or pull to achieve or quit forever, a pressurized cycle i was in the midst of up until a day or so ago. i suppose what moved me more to the middle was the release of my resistance. as it always is, and as one of my clients always says with a scoff and a smile when he has a realization, “god damn it.”

i released my attachment to my fear, which is not at all to say that the fear is gone. i’m just not hugging it to the point of paralysis anymore. i will write more into the journey through the waves, but it’s time for yoga.