I think that all my studying of Buddhism has been good for my mental health but bad for my writing. The discipline that I try to achieve when I am mindful is that of staying present, being concerned only with that which is before me and not indulging in the wild anxieties or delicious fantasies that my brain likes to conjure up. But of course, when one wants to tell a story, that's exactly what one does: she goes deeply into that part of her brain where all the fantasies live. She lets them run wild and she watches them and then she tries to rein them in and shape them into something that makes some sort of sense to her and hopefully the world at large.
Now I know that a wiser soul than myself would have a good answer for why writing stories is not the same as simply indulging in a crazy monkey mind full of fear and desires. But I think that since I am so new at this that I confuse the two and find that my imagination seems to have turned itself firmly off.
Meanwhile, almost everyone that I know is sick, or has been sick and is feeling battered about by the change in weather and in light, and the stress of the unknown. After a soft golden October, the cold and the clouds have settled in, often visited by the wind and the rain. I look around for beautiful things and they aren't hard to find. Sometimes looking at something beautiful is enough; sometimes it is not.
Yes, we are happy about the new president. Deeply relieved and moved - joyful even. But those sorts of joys are very much in the far away and abstract, and I am looking for something right here in front of me.
What would happen if I stopped labeling everything as "good" or "bad"? If I stopped having a preference for one thing over another? Can I expand that far?
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