My current morning ritual involves listening to Sad Heart Of Mine by Caspian. It’s just an incredible way to start the day. (Using the word ritual here gives the impression that I have other elements to it in addition to this song. My ritual is basically just this song, everything else is whatever I also manage to do.)
A few mornings back, I was listening to this song while walking to the bus. 7am on the empty suburban street. The morning air was cold, crisp, almost biting. Frost covered everything and sparkled in the dim dawn light. I was walking down the middle of the street, and I just looked up at the sky and I threw my arms open and smiled wide.
I get goosebumps practically every time.
I really like feeling all my feelings so deeply. The good ones at any rate. But how do you DO that?
Growing up I was told that I had to learn how to compartmentalize my feelings. I even mentioned it oh so long ago.
I never really knew what that meant, or how it was supposed to feel/look like. It was explained to me that when you have a feeling, to put it in a box, and shelve it to sort of “review” later. Today I see a kind of sense in this, but I wouldn’t not have explained it that way. For the most part, to me, it meant what it probably means to most people. Bottling up feelings, denying their existence. We all know how well that goes.
It’s fascinating to experience older versions of me in this blog and compare it to me today, more than a decade later. What I’ve learned about myself in the intervening time, for me anyway, is that the feelings/emotions I experience make we want to act in ways that reflect them and sometimes even amplify them. It’s awesome with positive emotions, but really destructive with the more negative ones. This is why I identified so strongly with Adam Duritz’s (Counting Crows) image of being a Rain-King. Woah here’s a write up about it right now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_King
In the end, you gotta feel your feels, but the real key is that you can control how to act in response.
That’s it. I mean it seems so obvious and stupid sitting here in one sentence on my dumb blog. Easier said than done. It's all about developing that monitoring muscle, governing my actions in response to feelings. Knowing when to expand it or contract. Build and re-enforce those grooves in my brain. It’s Mindfulness basically. It all comes back to that.
It’s the work of a lifetime, but probably the most important work I can do for myself, and by proxy, everyone else in my life. Your own oxygen mask first.
A few mornings back, I was listening to this song while walking to the bus. 7am on the empty suburban street. The morning air was cold, crisp, almost biting. Frost covered everything and sparkled in the dim dawn light. I was walking down the middle of the street, and I just looked up at the sky and I threw my arms open and smiled wide.
I get goosebumps practically every time.
I really like feeling all my feelings so deeply. The good ones at any rate. But how do you DO that?
Growing up I was told that I had to learn how to compartmentalize my feelings. I even mentioned it oh so long ago.
I never really knew what that meant, or how it was supposed to feel/look like. It was explained to me that when you have a feeling, to put it in a box, and shelve it to sort of “review” later. Today I see a kind of sense in this, but I wouldn’t not have explained it that way. For the most part, to me, it meant what it probably means to most people. Bottling up feelings, denying their existence. We all know how well that goes.
It’s fascinating to experience older versions of me in this blog and compare it to me today, more than a decade later. What I’ve learned about myself in the intervening time, for me anyway, is that the feelings/emotions I experience make we want to act in ways that reflect them and sometimes even amplify them. It’s awesome with positive emotions, but really destructive with the more negative ones. This is why I identified so strongly with Adam Duritz’s (Counting Crows) image of being a Rain-King. Woah here’s a write up about it right now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_King
Adam Duritz said, about this song: "I read this book in college when I was at Berkeley called “Henderson, the Rain King.” And the main character in the book was kind of this big, open-wound of a person, Eugene Henderson, he just sort of bled all over everyone around him. For better or for worse, full of joy, full of sorrow, he just made a mess of everything. And when I wrote the song years later, it didn’t really have anything to do with the book except the book had kind of become a totem for how I felt about creativity and writing–that it was just this thing where you just took everything inside of you and just sort of [funny noise] sprayed it all over everything, and not to worry too much about it. You try and craft it but not to be self-conscious about it, in any case. And, it’s sort of a song about everything that goes into writing, all the feelings, everything that makes you want to write, makes you want to maybe pick up a guitar and do it, and express yourself because it’s full of all the doubts and the fears about how I felt about my life at that time. And also the feeling that I really deserved something better than what I had accomplished up to that point. I think it *is* sort of a religious song about the sort of undefinable thing inside you or out there somewhere that makes you write, makes you create, makes you do any kind of art form, you know? And makes me the rain king, sort of."
In the end, you gotta feel your feels, but the real key is that you can control how to act in response.
That’s it. I mean it seems so obvious and stupid sitting here in one sentence on my dumb blog. Easier said than done. It's all about developing that monitoring muscle, governing my actions in response to feelings. Knowing when to expand it or contract. Build and re-enforce those grooves in my brain. It’s Mindfulness basically. It all comes back to that.
It’s the work of a lifetime, but probably the most important work I can do for myself, and by proxy, everyone else in my life. Your own oxygen mask first.
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