Into The Blood
Almost always I feel peaceful after meditation. I'm more focused and aware as I get about my tasks. Sometimes, I feel like I'm cruising about on an invisible Segway; at other times, I get a rush of energy which requires managing.
It's often creative, but also, despite the ongoing and increased calm which meditation brings - and maybe because of it - I start to remember resentments, insults, slights, as my sometime wounded ego kicks against and strikes out at the very process which is keeping it from dominating my life. That's the way of egos - they like to be in charge, and they are notoriously unwilling to let go of selfishness. Sometimes these 'dreadful' insults go back years, and despite my opinion to the contrary, they have not really been dealt with. They emerge from deep in my subconscious, rusty bicycles at the back of a garden shed, which should have been recycled the day after they stopped working. Today, in a really pleasant mood, I recalled an old, somewhat narcissistic (aren't we all!) but reliably negligent friend who texted me at random from a train a month ago, "Thinking of you as I listen to your album. It's great" Very nice I thought, but it's meaningless except as a function of his own sentimental nostalgia. If I meant anything to him (and I once did) he'd bother to actually call, he'd remember my birthday, he'd find out how I actually was. And frankly, the compliment is loaded. He'll like things of mine so long as he doesn't see them as competition. Life is too short for such things to hang on to, so.... Forgotten. Goodbye. Until now. After meditation today, jumping about, making tea, relaxed, happy, I had the sudden urge to text back the following mischief: "Not thinking about you much these days.." A bald statement of fact. He has gone his way, me mine. Tell it as it is. I don't really mean anything to you. Why the pretense? It's only vanity, whimsy... you're shoring up your patched-together view of yourself and co-opting me into that pointless exercise. Oh, the harsh, vexatious temptation to destroy goodwill. Which I ignored. Except to write it all down. ...into the blood, into the blood, into the blood, into the blood, into the blood...