To sniff the grass and pee

In the life coaching script-writing practice I’ve been only somewhat consistent at practicing, we’re supposed to start off our daily journaling with:

I’m so happy and grateful that [insert what glorious vision of success you are trying to manifest for your future self].

I’ve been struggling with this lately. My imagination is a raisin.

So instead, this morning, I wrote:

I am so happy and grateful now that I've let go of wishing that things could be any different than they are.

It’s bullshit, but it’s all I’ve got. And it’s not entirely inaccurate. Every choice I’ve made has led me here. They couldn’t have led me anywhere else.

Sure, maybe my choices themselves could have been different. But I made the right ones for me, at the time that I made them. So here I am, living their implications. Yet I don’t know that happy and/or grateful are really the right words to be using. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about a phrase that some people throw around as casually as popcorn: “I’m just dead inside.” I’ve been trying it on like impulse buys at Target, looking in the mirror and saying “neh, that’s not me,” but then wondering if maybe it could be me because it’s only $10 and I’d really like something new.

The phrase intrigues me in so many ways. 

If your mind is able to form a definition of what it might mean to be “dead inside,” then it can’t be dead, because it’s doing some serious cognitive thinking. But I guess that’s based on assuming this deadness is related to your mind in the first place, which would be a super narrow interpretation. (There goes the mind again, always assuming everything’s about her.) 

Of course, I know that “dead inside” isn’t really a cognitive assessment, but purely an emotional one. There’s no proof that anything inside us has passed, shriveled, wilted, evaporated. But there’s a hole, nonetheless. It’s like our brains have accepted what our hearts are telling us as fact, even though our hearts have been known to be irrational and unreliable most of the time. (No? Yours is reliable? Hmm, I’d like to know more, please.)

The particular deadness I think I’m experiencing right now is a little different than some of its previous iterations, although I definitely think we’ve met before. Actually, I know we have, because I’ve written about it, too. It’s more of a flatline than a plummet. Like the constant hum of some annoyingly peaceful enlightened person chanting “it is what it is,” over and over again. 

But what is “it?” Resignation, maybe? Acceptance? Exhaustion? They all feel like slightly different flavors of the same sugar-free ice cream. You eat it because it’s there, not because it actually tastes good.

It’s a very Buddhist philosophy—that part of the work of life is learning to be comfortable with what is. Not longing, not striving, not clinging, not wishing things were different. I understand it: suffering comes from the “what if” scenarios we create for ourselves, because “what if” is never reality in the present moment. It may be reality 5 years from now (what if I started my own business?), or even 5 minutes from now (what if I ate that cookie?), but right here, right now, there is only what is.

I get it. I really do.

But also, it’s so…blah.

Blah. Deadness. Yeah, I recognize the correlation.

Sooooooo…back to this script-writing thing. What am I so happy and grateful for, either right now, or in my future-self-world?

Present self is happy and grateful that my kids are healthy, for the most part, stomach issues and ADHD aside.

Present self is happy and grateful that I have good friends, a good job and a house, and that our family has mostly enough money for the things we need, although it would be nice to be able to pay off our credit card bills and actually go on a vacation, because goodness knows I could use one. 

But those are all external things. What am I happy and grateful for on the inside?

And what do I want my future self to be happy and grateful for?

I really don’t know.

That’s the thing about deadness, I guess. It makes wanting or wishing feel silly. Things are what they are. Wanting something else isn’t going to make it happen, because I need to not feel this deadness in order to actually do anything that would possibly create the change that feels silly to wish for. 

Ha! Take that, cognitive mind! What do you think about that logic puzzle, hmmm?

So, I sit. And I write. And I contemplate what is. 

And what is, right now, at 6:32am, is that I need to go take my dog for a walk. She doesn’t contemplate these kinds of existential things. She just wants to go sniff the grass and pee.

Maybe that’s what I should practice wanting for, too.

May we all simply want to go sniff the grass and pee, and may that be enough.