On Fearlessness and ADD

Imagine, you're walking along just fine and then suddenly, PLOP! Right down a manhole. If you can imagine that picture, it represents how each one of my thoughts have been lately. I get on a topic in my head, get half way to a question to present to The Teacher and PLOP... it's gone. My train of thought, my question... gone. What's going on?

When you ask American's what their problem with attention is, they'll be quick to tell you they have ADD. "Everyone has it," they'll say. But maybe we don't. Maybe what we have is plain old fashioned laziness.

The book I'm reading right now, Shambhala: the Sacred Path of the Warrior by Trungpa explores everyday life and how the mundane things don't have to excite us necessarily, but at least interest us.

Washing dishes doesn't make me want to break dance but I haven't taken the time to put a little pride into doing it. Being mindful means watching the soap bubble, the dishrag swirl and feel the cold water rinse my warm hands when I'm done and being good with that. This book also explores just your living space. It talks of even throwing your clothes on the floor is a great dishonor... to yourself.

I think about my own wandering mind and relate it back to the questions that start to form and then fade before my eyes. I spend the rest of the time trying to rediscover just what it is I'm looking to ask about. I find myself saying, "what was I just saying? where did that thought go?!"

In all the studies I've done lately, the deeper I get into enlightened living... I'm learning about things just on the cusp of my conceptual grasp and it's both incredibly intriguing and also terribly frustrating. It's like I can smell it, almost taste it and I'm just about to touch it but then it's gone and I don't even know how to tell you what it is that I saw. And no matter how hard I try to hold the concept, it drops and I fall from the ladder. Flat on my back again!

So ADD may not be everyone's problem and most likely it's not mine either, but we'll tack that word on it for now since nothing else suites my discomfort when trying to focus on an actual task. I'm too busy thinking about the teachings that I'm reading about but find myself falling short of practicing... Especially in the car. My road rage is outlandish.

The book continues on to say that as humans with an enlightened understanding, we must entreat our time here with nothing but tenderness to others and to approach, speak and carry ourselves with gentleness. This creates fearlessness and connects us to others on a deeper and more meaningful level.

But just as I'm also on the edge of grasping, in my tattered hands, what a second of tenderness may be, it is pulled out of reach and I digress. I loose direction, focus and drive.

Today I got sick.

I get sick and my body hurts and I'm propelled backwards, head first into fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of physical pain and fear that I will never be free from it's unrelenting clutches. So teach me how to not be afraid. Teach me to forget all that I know today!

It's like when Romeo pouts to Benvolio saying, "O, teach me how I should forget to think!"

He answers, "By giving liberty unto thine eyes; Examine other beauties."

And Romeo rambles on and in conclusion before he departs says to his friend, "Farewell: thou canst not teach me to forget."

But Benvolio knows better and replies, "I'll pay that doctrine, or else die in debt."

And the end result is that Benvolio holds the truth and doesn't seem bothered by it's presence. He knows Romeo can retrain his mind and he doesn't kill himself to prove it to his friend, he simply smiles knowingly and shakes his head, muttering a quiet opposition and certainty.

In by giving liberty to our eyes we can examine options, beauty, truth and if we are lucky, find something that means everything to us; a something so strong you feel as though you could die for it.

Can I Be Still?

In "Meditation isn't for sissies", we are reminded that we're not going to a happy place when we close our eyes, we're not going any place at all.

In all the creative outlets I have available to me, none have proven to be as comforting and easy to run into as "my happy place", as Adam Sandler would say. I can draw a picture if the mood strikes me, I can create an illustration as close to my thought as possible (though they are rarely the same). I can write a good story and describe everything in detail. But even if I sat here and wrote about how fat, loud and strong the rain was, I am the only one getting hit in the face with it, inside the screen. I could tell you about the cool air, the thunder and the flashes of lightning but I'm the only one who can smell the grass and feel the hair on my arm stand.

But imagination is increasingly powerful with practice and when my hands were too tired to draw and my eyes were too tired to read, I could always close my lids and simply imagine.

Sitting in the dentist chair I've concentrated on the same boat picture since 3rd grade. While drills roll inside my head and metal scrapes, I am fishing. I am on the dock having pizza or I am breezing through the ocean in the background.

When I was mad at home, at school or at work, I simply switched off from reality and willed myself into another existence. I wanted something to distract me. I guess most people refer to it as day dreaming. I thought of it as displacement. As I sit here, the thunder cracks and the neighbor roots for the sound. The rain is ruthless against my deck but I am in the jungle somewhere sitting in a tree hut and the darkness of my back yard is really cloaking miles of thick rainforest. When I sit in the shower in my bathroom, it is the same feeling.

I've often wondered if what I were doing all these years was some kind of cliff note to what a sip of meditation would be. These past few weeks I've come to see the difference is ruthlessly far apart. Michael only puts in words what I couldn't when he says this practice is, indeed, the hardest.

The sliding door of this bedroom is open a crack so I can hear the rolling and screaming of the sky. That is the reality of this night and instead of disappearing to another country, I should be taking joy that the beauty is litterally in my back yard.

My mother comes to the door and tells me to switch off the computer. Lightning travelling through the computer is reality too. It happened to us once.

So the moral is that while far off places seem beautiful and peoples faces seem more intricate in other lands, it is a simple case of "the grass is greener on the other side". It is with intent open eyes that we should stop looking past the back yard and appreciate the very wood of the deck we are standing on.

Until I can see the deck as a deck and not a tree house, I'm not sure if I am ready to sit on the deck and just let it be nothing... not even a deck. If I've been substituting things like the deck for tree houses, I must first work backwards and go back to seeing them and appreciating what they are, no matter how simple.

Once the deck is a deck, then I can go a step further and forget the deck exists altogether. Is that when I can be still?