Taking Stock of One’s Day

(an RD installation)

Something about energy and enthusiasm, chi most likely, and its movement toward…?
Where is one going today? Is there a sense a movement or moving forward toward something (maybe even someone).

Likely something resembling felt meaning and purpose. “This is my goal or plan for the day. This really reflects who I most am, what represents my best, and some vague road to peace, pleasure, (outer) destiny, (inner) peace or personal fulfilment.”

Some daze the wheels spin or one feels ‘lost’ doing even the tiniest, most mundane things. To accomplish the smallest thing seems to require the greatest effort. Other times, one spiritually leaps over many tasks, distances, accomplishing literally everything. ‘On top of one’s game.’

It’s a matter sometimes of how the day registers. “Today I will likely do this much.” Or: “Today I will accept the flow of life and circumstance and not try to change the universe or others in any way at all.”

On the other hand, consciousness is consciousness, and one is aware always of how much or how little is going on as life ebbs and flows. Acceptance and letting go do have their roles, especially when one is finally removed from the daily drudgery of Work and ‘making a living’. In earlier years, there is always motion, routine, the ‘locked-in’ effect. Ambition, if one has any. Joni Mitchell’s “So many things I would have done…” is more likely the commoner tale of the lifetape–the projects only dreamed and left unfinished and unaccepted by others. And there is such a thing as “Going against the prevailing current” especially involving the many others, not just bosses or unimaginative people who control whatever purse strings.

I speak only from experience and add that, recurringly, I have found it necessary to ‘leave the formation’ and do and find what interests me or ‘is me’. I cannot hold others responsible for whatever their limits and limitations might be. That is for them to work out or through. Always I must make of my day what I shall do on my own–as me, for me, to begin with.

After all, if one pretty much knows who one is and what one is like, in both strengths and weaknesses–those limits and limitations I spoke of–then one is at least operating from a known base or within some common-sensible context regardless of what others or the greater world, including nature, are doing. It is much harder to get lost if you have answered the Alice Caterpillar’s question (“Who are you?”) as much as you likely can or will.

An inner centeredness removes much that is seemingly in flux. That centeredness has the surety and confidence of inner freedom or autonomy that is not dependent on the whims of others and the buffets of the exterior world. Far better to have that state relative to family, friends, love, and even work.

Facts: there will always be change, obstacles, setbacks, crises, disappointments, disillusionments, stupidity, ignorance, and the numerous limits and limitations of others, let alone oneself. But one will always be most responsible for one’s own fate, one’s own life, one’s own satisfactions, pleasures, engagements, purpose, and meaning. No one else.

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