Try cultivating a sense of anticipation, rather than expectation. If you expect something it’s probably going to be easier to describe. You might have a strong sense of what you think is going to happen, where, when and so on. Anticipation is a sense of remaining open, ready to act and staying involved. Anticipate better and you’ll be a lot happier.
I’m immersed in relentlessly raining blocks: shapes falling without a care for me.
This is my Tetris-dream – life as it is, indifferent to me. The pieces arrive like the complications of every moment I live, every block adding to a pile that might burn, a bonfire of my vanity: thinking I had it under control. Resentment.
As I read this I see where my dream’s pointing: Panksepp’s RAGE drive, that instinctive response to obstruction. This is the tension that builds as the game speeds up. In life it’s one mistake that takes me to the point of frustration but the accumulation, the steady gnawing away at my sense of control as the screen fills.
Time slips away. Life is merciless. Resentment, born from miscalculations, grows until until it looms above me, a tower of unresolved tension.
But the game holds a hand out to me (we’re back with the dream). Clear a line and I feel relief. For a moment I’m out of the chaos. This is anger. Something on the RAGE scale, somewhere between, gently, ‘no’ and I kick the doors down because this house is burning.
Clarity, for a moment. Resolution. It feels better.
But Tetris, like life, offers no real peace unless you’re Harry Hong or someone like him, who probably starts playing Tetris again: everything begins with repetition. The blocks keep raining down. The only way to win is by recognising what comes, adjusting to each and every complication.
This is the silent truth of Tetris. Control is fleeting, just like anger. Survival means accepting the inevitability of disorder, not trying to stop it but finding harmony within its flow.
I dream of sailors on an uncertain ocean, ever-reading the sky and the sea in ways that might escape me – or you. Life is about our powers of prediction, about following the impossible. Patient, sometimes lucky.
Don’t let things fizzle out. Try to keep a definite focus on the things that you do. When you finish an event, a project, a show, a party, a whatever, try to shift into something else as if you are stepping into another room. If you feel vague or anxious or what gets called ‘lazy’, take a moment to step into that new thing. You’ll carry forward the energy from whatever you’ve just done. If you need to stop something without completing it make sure you end in the middle of things: mid-sentence, feeling in mid-air. (more…)
Dreams are very handy things. I often have a lot of them when I start thinking intensely about something. Don’t ignore them, don’t try to interpret them, just see where they take you as if they are a kind of a taxi. (more…)
I’ve written about being at the centre of your own solar system somewhere else, but a talk I listened to at the weekend made me think about it again. Think about the relationships in your life and how intensely you’d cling on to whatever they contain. That clinging involves the stuff of Panksepp’s emotional instincts. Life, it seems, depends on how we respond affectively, our emotions guiding our thoughts towards ‘what supports out survival and detracts from our survival’. (more…)
Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want.
Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded by negative intensity… worries, resentments and so on … the kinds of thing that will leave you stuck. causes a loss, sometimes a radical loss, of momentum. These three things promote positive intensity: the joy of being able to feel relaxed and thoughtful, the pleasure of being in harmony with your life, and the ability to start and stop things when you need to.
Experiment with different amounts of time for the in-breath, pause and out-breath to see what suits you most for a situation. Box breathing is something you can always turn to discreetly
Stop being taken for a ride. Go and see films specifically to explore whether staying watching them or leaving is the best option. After you leave you need to be able to tell someone why you left. How long can you stay before you’re confident the film is not going to deliver what you need? You can experiment like this with any kind of experience, really. Always hold a place for your right to leave, work out how to do this in ways that feel right for you and others (ie storming out might not be the best option – quietly departing might be instead. Do you really want to make a point? What will the effect of that be on?
Buy a tuning fork or two and sound these close to your ear for an instant experience of being present in the world, connected to something outside of you that leaves you feel grounded in yourself.