Results tagged “anger”

Have you ever forgotten everything you’ve ever learned? I had a severe case of amnesia last week that lasted maybe 48 hours. During this period, out the window went every single bit of accumulated sage advice from friends, any wisdom picked up over years of therapy, the philosophy behind my martial arts training, each hard won bit of insight from nearly a decade of almost daily meditation and plenty of Buddhist teachings and god knows how many self-help books, and all those lessons learned in the School of Hard Knocks. In short. I got pissed off. Really, really, really, really fucking pissed off.

Lately, my favorite part of each day is that one brief moment when I emerge, groggy, from a night’s sleep that likely was disrupted numerous times by one nightmare or another. Nightmares don’t, as a rule, plague me often. But times like these, when Monkey Mind is my constant companion, there seems to be no escaping the rat wheel of my own brain. For much large and stinky shit has been hitting my fan of late, and as it happens, someone left the fan on high, and I can’t reach the pull cord to slow it down. So it’s just shit shit shit all over the place. Now, I am not a complete idiot—on some level I understand that while the grief that has been accompanying all this shit can, at times, feel overwhelming, in the long run, I’m going to be just fine. Some little part of my mind really does understand that the only constant is change. And the voice of experience, whispering way far in the background, may be faint, but at least it exists, and it reminds me of a couple of things. First, this too shall pass. And second, while grief is certainly not a competition, my own mound of doo-doo is, compared to that of so many others, actually quite small and manageable, or at least will be once I get my feet on the ground.