Solent Green – blog

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Trying

Why is it that I don’t want to write about happy things? I have just come back from four days on a narrow boat with Simon and Dina and the dogs, the sun shone, the river flowed, the scenery was pretty, on the first night there were owls hooting and I read and crocheted and watched the ripples and the ducks and laughed. But I come back and don’t want to write about it, can’t think of what to say about lying in my bunk with the gentle motion of the moored boat and the lapping of the water. I can still feel the motion even now, even sitting in meditation this morning, trying to be clear, trying to be focused, but the world moving underneath me such that I started to feel queasy, even though all is as it should be and the sun is shining, and I was planning to listen to Saturday Live in an hour but maybe I should forget it all and walk to the sea, but it will be crowded, a sunny Saturday, or maybe not, maybe it’s early enough to just be me out there, perhaps I should just do that, just walk and be there and have breakfast (I haven’t had breakfast) spend the day in the garden, because there’s so much that needs to be done, or in the house, in a way it would be easier if it was raining like the forecast said, easy not to go out, just to stay here and do what needs to be done. But the sun is a temptation, and this isn’t getting on with any of those things, isn’t getting anything done.

And I’m not writing about what I’ve been thinking about, finding myself and understanding myself and accepting myself and loving myself. How about just being myself? Laughing at myself, I read a blog post from 2013 recently about the bloke at the ‘School of Philosophy’ group in Peterborough, saying ‘why can’t you learn to laugh at yourself?’ That’s important, that’s one of the ways I’ve tried to do this in the past, to see my incompetence and stupidity as a kind of joke, I felt that when I was a student, that I was just someone who was here to be laughed at, in my late teens and early twenties, that’s how I felt about myself, I remember that now, but it wasn’t a happy thing, I wasn’t glad to be that way, I despised myself just as I despise myself now.

Because what happened when I was away? I did so many stupid things, made so many mistakes. I know for a fact that I’m more forgetful than most people, that’s a given, but I have this strong sense that I am also more incompetent, clumsy, awkward, not good at understanding what’s required of me and even worse at doing it, so that I must be a nightmare to have to deal with and this is why I’m so useless and worthless.

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Wet Sunday

No blogging this morning. I am now at Simon’s, ready for our narrow boat adventure tomorrow. It was a rainy, nasty drive, with road works on theA3 – or rather, no evidence of any actual work going on today, but one lane was closed either side of the roundabout that goes to Selbourne, and that was enough to mess the traffic up.

Southsea Soup meeting this morning, a new lady called Claire who seems to know a lot about marketing and is full of ideas, like giving people money to buy copies and then getting them to write reviews on Amazon. To me it seems that the flaw is that we have bought the books ourselves, but I kind of see what she’s getting at about the reviews.

It feels like it’s been quite a long day already – well, admittedly it is five thirty – almost dinner time.

Think I did okay with the packing, the only thing I’ve thought of (so far) that I haven’t brought is the Destination Portsmouth game. I even charged up the mini-wifi and found the card with the password on it. I got a sales call from Virgin yesterday asking if I wanted to buy one, and when I said I’d already got one she asked how much I was paying and I said £10.99 per month, she gave up and sounded quite sad because evidently she couldn’t compete with that. The stupid thing of course is that I’ve been paying that for almost three years and I never use it. So I thought, this would be an ideal opportunity. Even if we run out of data and have to pay more, well, I’ve been paying all that time for nothing, so it seems like I might as well use it.

I didn’t really think I was going to be able to find the password, I’d convinced myself it was a lost cause, but there was the box with the card in on the unit in the study, and I tested it and confirmed it worked.

I didn’t do much packing and preparation till the last minute again, I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get started on this top-down crochet jumper (third attempt). I will crack that eventually. But as I found last week, it seems that leaving things to the last minute is actually less stressful than spreading the stress over several days – which is not what I would have predicted.

Reading the Why Buddhism Works book, this morning (when I couldn’t sleep) there was something really interesting about the relationship between feelings and thought. I will have to read that further.

I came up with a haiku before leaving home as well. I’ve actually got a few in hand now – two or three, anyway. One is quite dark so not sure whether I am going to share that one.

I mentioned at the Soup meeting about putting more on the Facebook page, like the idea I stole of getting people to add lines to a limerick. Trevor was quite scathing and said that no one had responded much to things he and Steve had put on there. I said that’s why we need to get some traffic, and he said, but nobody responds so there’s no point, and at least Claire and Freya backed me up. I mentioned about opening a twitter account and again he wasn’t enthusiastic but Freya was and she said Instagram as well, so as she uses Instagram a lot (being an artist, unlike me) I’ll do that as well. See if we can get some social media buzz going. And write some more stories as well, of course. That’s another matter.

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Sitting on a cushion on the floor

New blog day 2 – aha!!! Not sure why I said that but I had to start somewhere.

Got up okay this morning, did my yoga although I got stressed out at the start because I was trying to light incense sticks which kept snapping (or rather, an incense stick which snapped in half, then I tried lighting the halves, then I got another one and lit it and every time I tried putting it in the holder it snapped again so I ended up with about five pieces and I’m running out of matches and the windowsill in the meditation room/spare bedroom is a mess of ash and dead matches and snapped bits of incense stick because I never clean it up, excuse being that I never remember to put a clean bag in the bin…) Well, that’s how my life is, even when I’m specifically trying to bring serenity into it.

In the end I sat for the extra ten minutes at the end of the audio file because my mind was such a mess during the yoga and the sitting, though when it’s like that I’m not sure whether sitting for longer actually adds anything to what happened in the first place. It’s hard for me to distinguish ‘meditation’ from ‘sitting and thinking about crap’, although I’m pretty sure that most of what I do is the latter, and that can happen at any time, not just when I’m sitting in my meditation room on a cushion on the floor. So is it worth persisting even when you feel that way? Most of what I read and know about meditation implies that it is, and that that happens to everybody, but I think: ‘well, they don’t know exactly HOW crap my mind is, and I’m probably much crapper than them, they just don’t realise…’

I think that’s why I give up such a lot. But there again, I give up on everything – and probably for the same reasons.

I think I’ve got to a good place in terms of letting go of the idea that happiness is to be found ‘out there’ – in material things, external circumstances, other people etc etc. I don’t do the: ‘I’ll be happy when/if…’ thing any more, but there again, I don’t think I’ve taken that seriously for years. But… my therapist, B, talks about being kind to myself, doing the things that make me happy – and how is that not looking to external things? Maybe it’s a matter of degree – a world cruise vs popping to the café for a cream tea to improve my mood for an hour or so, something like that. Are café-sitting, cream teas and crochet forms of addiction? The contentment they induce doesn’t always last that long, but at least they’re relatively cheap, non-damaging and easy to reproduce. And I’ve yet to start escalating on to a harder version of any of them (interesting to contemplate what that might be).

Side-tracked again. What was I going to move onto? The idea that happiness is found in getting to know ‘one’s true self’. Ah, that’s a lovely can of worms for another time.

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Killing time

Good title. Could even be a title for this blog.

I seem to have spent most of today faffing about setting up this blog. I’m sure it was never that difficult in the old days. Either I’m getting more stupid (quite likely) or creating blogs has got a lot more complicated (ditto).

Not sure what (if anything) I want to say here, now. But I’ve already broken my first rule of blogging by typing this straight onto the page and not into a Word document which can be kept, checked, edited etc etc.

Whenever I restart blogging it’s customary for me to say, well, I used to blog every day, but got out of the habit, so this is me starting again, blah, blah, blah, let’s see how long it lasts.

I wonder?

I used to write 500 words a day, you know. Just thought I’d point that out.

My therapist (yes, I’ve got one of those, of the psycho and not physio or any other-o variety), whom I saw yesterday, thinks it will be good for me to write again. Or keep writing. Or whatever. Despite the fact that I’ve given up because, well… I always give up. That’s just something about me. As that American humourist who’s really really famous but my mind has just gone blank – aha, yes, Mark Twain, that’s the fella – as he allegedly said about smoking, giving up is easy, I’ve done it dozens of times. Starting again seems to be getting progressively harder, however.

It’s been a funny old day. I skipped writers group this morning with the excuse that, well, they were doing a competition today and I haven’t written anything for it and I thought I could find better uses of my time than trekking over there and listening to everyone else reading out their contributions, but really it’s just because I’m lazy and couldn’t be arsed, and indeed I didn’t find a better use of my time. But the blog is here now and I’m two-thirds of the way towards that 500 words.

In fact I wrote 500 words this morning before I even started on this crazy let’s-start-another-blog thing, and I haven’t used any of them, or rather, I’ve almost certainly used at least some of them, but not in the same order, if you see what I mean.

Some days just get you like that. I haven’t even been for my customary go-and-sit-in-a-cafe-somewhere-and-drink-tea excursion to bump up the total on my step-counter (which is a whole other can of womrs which I’ll probably get back to some time).

Choir this evening. I haven’t been for a month. I ducked out of the last concert and the last two preparatory rehearsals. I really ought to go. I’ll enjoy it when I get there.

Somehow I’ve managed to miss lunch altogether. Cafe time? It’ll be dinner time in a couple of hours and I really should have some dinner, cook something, I mean. Yesterday I went out and had fish and chips at the beach cafe. Yum

I’m sure I’ll have something more exciting to write about tomorrow.