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Stillness - the Antidote to Busy

I knew it as I wrote it yesterday. I knew what all my busyness meant and was doing in my life. I don’t want to be still because that is when I feel the pain. The loss. The grief. The sadness. And I fucking hate all of those feelings. And I will go to great lengths to not feel them. But those fuckers are steadfast and stalwart. They have staying power. And what I realized yesterday is that they are also patient and polite. They will let me run all over doing all the things, and wait until I slow down to get me. I eventually wear myself out and have to slow down and be still. And sometimes it feels like sadness, pain, loss and grief just sit idly by waiting to ambush me...


Which is why my life has been led in the fast lane. Like super fast, operating under the delusion that I could out run them. I can’t. I see that again, better.


I sat on my cushion yesterday for a long time. I have been avoiding meditation because I do not want to know my mind well right now. I have had trouble in this area for a couple of months. And what came to me yesterday was this ugly truth that I was trying to run from, that I KNEW would get me as soon as I sat down and allowed all those negative feelings to catch up...my relationship is over.

We have been circling the drain for months now, hanging on because of the life support efforts of quick connections and very not intimate contact. He left. That was a sign. I knew it when I ended things then but then I wasn’t ready to let him go. And I wasn’t ready to let go of the dreams we had. I wanted him and them so much that I couldn’t see that there was nothing left to build them upon.

I see that now. I see it and I accept it.


Being still in love’s aftermath is hard. Sitting with all the feelings and the million iterations of conversations that I have with him in my head is painful. And I cannot stop them from coming. They are just there and I find myself talking to him when I am still, or even when I am not. I want things to be different but they are not. And I am finally finding some acceptance about it all.


I see cyrking in my future...

There is nothing left to do or say, it is just done. We are over. There are no more loose ends for me. And he doesn’t appear concerned at all about his, so I am just going to allow that to be what it is.

It is amazing to me how I can love someone so much and feel like we are on the same page, to find that actually what did I really have to begin with? Sure it was good in the beginning...that is what got us here. But we have been limping along for months, at least eight. So three months of great, followed by eight months of an ever evolving bad.


It is painful the loss. But I know that in the stillness that remains, I will find peace and comfort and something to look forward to. I learned some hard lessons in this relationship and engaged in behavior I am not proud of, and that is what came to me yesterday...I do not like who I have become in this relationship. I do not like this version of myself. I am not better with him, I have become something else entirely. Someone that I do not recognize or really enjoy.


And once more it is brought home to me that sadness, pain, grief and loss are important, vital in our lives because without them we fail to learn things we desperately need to. So I sat with them yesterday and attempted to hear what they had to say. I still don’t like it. I still wish it were different but I accept that it is not.


And so one more time I learn more deeply that silence and stillness are required for healing. Busyness is just another avenue for my old ideas to reign supreme. And in all that activity I become lost, instead of found. And today I want to be found, I want to know, I want to learn so that I may more completely let go. Walk on. Move fonward.


I really hate the lessons but I am evolving. I am changing and I can feel it and see it. And being a mess is ok. It is weird and foreign, which in and of itself is growth. I used to be a mess all the damn time. Like every day I would wake up and there would just be wreckage...today, I feel like I am there again. And I am seeing, one more fucking time, that there is a great amount of lesson in the mess and carnage of love aftermath.


And I can be still and allow the feelings to come and just be without all the busyness to distract me from myself, from the lessons I do not seem to want to learn, from the heartbreak one more time. I am not sure if I will ever get it right but perhaps I can get it better. One day at a time.


Writing helps. It is something to do while sitting still. Allowing the pain to pour out onto the screen and change me. One tiny word at a time, grief in print. And I am grateful to have this many years of living the miracle one moment after another. So that I may be a resource for others, an example and warning. Even though I would so prefer to be only example, and a lot less warning.

I am a work in progress, again, still. And I come to know that, experience it, feel it, in proportion to the degree and manner I allow stillness to be present and take its righful place in my life...




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