I am struggling with it. It is hard to not do as it turns out. I apparently do not like the present moment. I say that because I am always trying to get away from it, retreating to the past or leaping into the future. Time traveling is real, don’t believe me? I invite you into the confines of my mind...not only is time travel possible, it is the preferred methodology of existence. Enter if you dare...
It was suggested to me recently to stay present. To stop going to the past, to stop leaping into the future. And I said that I would do it. And I knew it would be hard, but I will tell you that I didn’t know it would be excruciating. Like I didn’t know. And I didn’t know because I think I haven’t tried in a very long time. Like a long, long time. I am not sure where that got lost, that intention, that way of living, but it is like I have awakened from a dream and it is 50 years later, and I am just coming to realizing how much I have missed in the intervening years due to my inability to remain present.
All of life happens in the present moment. And I realize that I miss a great deal of it because I am never really there. My body is there, but my mind and heart and soul, those things about me are elsewhere, usually far, far away from wherever my body is located.
And I can see that this is likely a trauma response. There have been times in my life where I have been so incredibly hurt that my ability to mentally remain where my body was impossible. Thus the time traveling. I was able to leave the body and the present moment and go to a place that was less painful, and perhaps felt more productive and safe. And that is something I have been doing ever since.
To some degree all human beings do this. We all time travel, day dream, remove ourselves to a place and time that is more befitting a more positive mental space. I do realize that for me, it has become pathological. Everyone is only getting a proxy of me, some sort of Erin Avatar that stands in and represents. It isn’t really me. I am somewhere in another time and place. Attempting to find solution by rehashing the past, or desperately trying to create some new identity and future for myself. Some place in time that will be better for everyone. But mostly me.
So stopping the time travel is hard. Like super hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I slip into it so easily that I am often light years away before I even recognize that I am gone. It would be helpful if there were other people close enough to me to see that I have left the building, but mostly, I spend a great deal of time alone, occupied and entertained, sometimes quite macabrely, but away from the here and now that feels so threatening.
So I am finding myself saying things like this repeatedly:
I am walking the dogs.
I am here, sitting in the sun.
I am here writing this blog.
I am here not being able to sleep.
I am here with this pain that I do not know what to do with.
I am here in this situation that I can’t improve and I can’t leave and it is awful.
I am here, struggling.
It helps. It brings me back to the present moment and stops the time traveling. For about 15 seconds, then I am back at it again...still. Fuck.
But I know of no other way to gain better access to my presence and present. So that is what I am going to keep doing, over and over again until my ability and facility of time traveling subsides.
I am not sure where I got the notion that being here, right now, was something to escape from...but I can just own that I did and I have. And not doing it after all these years of reinforcing time traveling as a way and manner of living, is a new kind of exhaustive way of being that is wearing me the fuck out. I mean, I would have thought the time traveling would be the more exhausting thing...but alas, no. It is being here, in this moment, open to its possibilities and its perils. That, as it turns out, is fucking hard and quite hellish.
But within this hard hell, I believe there is a separate peace to be found and enjoyed. And I have experienced it, however fleeting, in the moments where I reclaim myself from the past and future and drop into my body already currently engaged in present life...and I find myself acutely present and accounted for...and for that moment that I am all collected in the present, I find myself a bit of relief from the mind that grinds and binds.
Again...still.
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