You put on the TV so you don’t have to think about your own life. You got hurt and you sit on the couch and feel useless. You can’t do anything else so you turn on the TV. You listen to the news in the morning to find out what’s going on in the world. 🙏🏼
My favorite part of every day is the time I spend writing in my journal. It’s the very opposite of these behaviors I just mentioned, behaviors I witness in my family. The TV distracts me from me. I don’t want to be distracted from me. I want to be with me. I sit happily and write for hours because my mind loves analyzing itself. The body gets impatient when I sit for hours writing. It wants to move so when I’m satiated or drowning in that over-thinking under-moving state, I drag myself to the yoga mat and breath and slog through uncomfortable postures and cry and listen and feel whatever is there. The body wants it. The mind resists.
Why why why? Because I love being connected and in relationship with humans. I am the first and only human I can ever connect with in this intimate way. I’m the only one who can give me the depth I desire, the only one with the answers I crave. Whatever feelings are uncomfortable will pass and change when I sit with them long enough.
This lifestyle is more intense. I’m minimizing the numbing and zoning out. I open myself up to feel it all, painful and ugly and beautiful and sweet. I feel love and loss deeper perhaps. My emotional spectrum is wider than the average honey bear and thus I feel I have so much more to express. So it pours out in words and paint and songs and dance and poems and conversations.
It all starts at the beginning of the day. The TV and radios and voices outside are turned off. I open the page and take the lid off the pen and listen inside. Who is talking in there?
