I did a radical thing. I deleted the repeat scheduling in my digital calendar holding time. Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, time I used to block and schedule with rigour and resolve, to meditate, move, write and practice other forms of reconnection and release.
For as long as I've had a digital diary, I've protected the hours around 5am and 8am, marked in either pale green or grey, to indicate the creativity of reading and the shift in light from dark to day reserved for spiritual practices. It's as though blocking the time and colour coding possesses it. It's a boundary, a gate, a portal and I must, without interference or delay, guard that time preciously, for the sake of sanity.
While I've removed the blocks, the intention still remains. Those hours are indeed precious. They are still devoted to peaceful awakening, to quietude and solace. Only the intention is so much a part of my way now, and the destractions are fewer and further, that the barriers can come down. I no longer feel the need to fiercely mark the boundary.
Letting go brings space, and space brings freedom
Even prior to moving to the country, a rural idyll where space has opened up figuratively, mentally and practically, I was aware that some routines had come to hinder rather than help me. Marking my calendar was bordering on addictive. I'd even put things in after the event, colour code them, and look at how full my week was, as though it was an indicator of time well spent. It gave a false sense of control.
It was beginning to deplete me. So I stopped. Partly because the house move and the ensuing adrenaline comedown disrupted all routine.
And also because I'm now in a place and space where there are physically fewer constrictions and therefore mentally, I feel released of the need to fiercely guard my time from interruptions that even when not real, the imagination of them, the anticipation of them, the anxiety about them - created in part by the city environment that was tied up with the thrusting and driving ambition of a time and society that didn't suit me - was suffocating.
I realised it at the time, for the years I was growing out of (having very much indulged and enjoyed) the mayhem and high energy of the city, that it was making me someone I didn't want to be. Agitated, grumpy, restless, impatient.
Those characteristics are still with me - wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes - but like the dying embers of a previously rip roaring fire that was threatening to burn my house down, now, they're just keeping me warm in a corner rather than giving me heart burn.
It's early days and so the stomach acid still simmers. Old habits die hard. I caught myself short when I realised I was getting restless about resting the other day. Hah, oh mind, when will you just give it up?!
"I should be doing… what… something I should be doing something… what is it.. have I forgotten something?" goes the mind monkey narrative.
No. Nothing. I haven't. I'm just recovering from the samsaric cycle of planning the life and joy out of everything, out of fear, in a bid to control, which used to give me a legit, dizzying and dangerous high of feeling accomplished and yet also carried with it a distracting sense of compulsion, dread and irritation when things changed.
That's the double edged sword of structure. It can contain and constrain experience just as much as it can provide a framework or a platform for it. It can fuel or it can repress.
Recovery is a process, change takes time
Without the dogma of my diary, how should I spend my time? What do I do in the hours I wake early that for years, I persisted with a routine of coffee, meditation, reading, writing, yoga (always in that order, which when I wavered from, aroused either a sense of gleeful rebellion or disappointment in myself).
My heart and body knew this routine was dead. that it was dimming my inner light, dampening my spirit's effervescence. For the past little while, I'd be going to it heavily, grumpily, resentfllully, but rationalized with my intellectual problem-solving brain that I just needed more discipline. It wasn't the structure. The plan was sound. Life thus far and writers I admired told me so.
I'm not anti planning. Or anti structure. Far from it. To be anti is just as dangerous as to be fiercely pro. Extremes are where the pain occurs. It's simply that I found my way (via the extremes of experience) in the middle ground. For a long while, I needed and benefited from the anchors of blocked time. It settled my agitated mind and gave thoughts a place to sit when I could demarcate what I needed to do and when, and then stop having to think so much about it.
Planning also kept all manner of harmful habits born of distraction and restlessness at bay. The momentum and the scheduled pauses kept me on track, on the path, steady, consistent, glad and satisfied. The structure kept me committed to my intentions and values when the impact of external thrusts threatened to drag me asunder and away. To know and see and acknowledge, and to purposefully commit my time to more things that aligned with what mattered and less things that didn't, was how I created the causes and conditions, in so far as I could control them, that led me to now. Blocking those early hours and sticking to the plan of no communication or incoming before 8.30am, no meetings until 10am, allowed me to breathe life into an unhurried morning that was all the richer for it. All of which remains the case, albeit I am now cutting loose the training wheels, the reigns, the tethers.
Because those reigns went from facilitating my process to hampering it. There was an undercurrent of tracking. Of measuring the worth of my being via doing. Of qualifying the merits of how I live in terms of quantifiable nuggets of time spent and evidenced in a certain way. Units of measurement building up like little bricks, fortressing, buttressing and weighing heavy, blocking the way to freedom like an arbitrary fence within a wide open field. Structure became a trap. As per the invidious yuk of capitalism and the stain of post Industrial demands on/theft of time and living.
Losing and finding the way
I thought I'd lost my mojo, my vim, my drive. And I had. It had petered out. Got compacted and sedimented, as happens when you spend too long somewhere, when you outstay your welcome. Doing things that no longer serve you but insist that you should. Why?
Why do we make ourselves suffer with these habits? The basic answer is, that's life. There is suffering in life. No reasoning will lessen that fundamental fact. And, as per the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, there is a way out and through. When we get lost, as we invariably will, we can find our way back to sense. And that's where to focus. On changing direction. Doing something differently. Pivoting. Choosing more wisely. Responding with patience and care. Which means listening intently. Rather than reacting with a proverbial bat and stick to beat the situation into the shape you think it ought to be because, why, who said so?
Thus here we are in the wide open space of the country. Free now of so much stuff. Open to whatever is here. Simple, uncluttered, untracked bliss.
I still rise early, because gladly, that hasn't changed in decades, it's a habit, a commitment to living fully that I love.
I listen, look around, sit down with a book of poetry, quietly while away the time, not counting or watching the clock for the next thing, drinking my tea, moving my body, or staring out the window, in ways and time that feel right, rather than being orchestrated by my calendar. Just doing this thing. Being here now. The rest will flow. I trust that now. Partly thanks to the routines, structures and habits that I cultivated.
“Smile, you are alive.” Thich Nhat Hanh
Pausing to lower my pen and lift my gaze, I notice in the mirror temporarily sitting on the floor of the room we've not quite finished settling into, that my smile has returned. The one that comes without an observer. That isn't reacting but simply expressing. And the palpitations are gone. The ones that used to flutter in synchronicity with a furrowed brow that indicated haste and hurry. No thank you, not now, no more. Everything a little less. The days are more full for it.
Here comes the pastel sky. The light is shifting. The chickens need feeding.