Dear Readers,
A famous Cuban-French writer named Anais Nin once wrote, “We
write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect”. For the past year,
this blog has been my way of channeling thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Writing is an outlet for me. It is a way for me to rationalize my feelings, conceptualize
my thoughts and shape my perceptions. In business development, I use process
flow maps to capture the life journey of an input transpiring to an output or
result. This visual allows me to isolate the specific output so that I can investigate,
study, and track its journey. By the end of it, I have a clear and concise
visual of the entire process, a process that I can then tweak, refine, and
optimize.
In my personal life, “the pen has been the tongue of my mind”
and this blog has been a journey holding an account of various inputs materializing
to my present life. Writing has helped me understand my thoughts and improve my
communication with me and those around me. Although writing has been my passion, I have been searching
for something more.
I want peace and balance that promoted healthy, pleasant and positive thinking.
This is what I believe has culminated from my journey thus far. A realization that
thinking negatively is draining while thinking positively is energizing and
uplifting. And this is precisely when I started looking for it right away.
I began by practicing detachment, a form of meditation
rooting from the Buddhist practice of Vipassana. This approach teaches us that grief, irritation,
and annoyance are inevitable in this life. However, if you can plant yourself in
stillness long enough, you will in time, experience the truth that everything
(both positive and negative) does eventually pass. I think most of us have
gotten used to readjusting every time we find ourselves in emotional or physical
discomfort. This is our way of escaping the reality of irritation and annoyance.
So we don’t actually really deal with it. Perhaps, this is the reason why I started
to feel writing wasn’t enough for me.
So I sat there with a straight back, eyes closed, and legs
crossed. I took a few deep breathes and told myself, “I can do this, I’m going
to sit here for 20 minutes straight… and simply meditate”. It was a lot harder
than I thought. It’s something about trying to sit in stillness -without movement-
that you suddenly realize that you need to scratch your back, have to go pee,
or should have had some water before you sat down. You would think that a
clearing of mind space would create room for peace, when in fact; all it did
was open the doors to a flood of thoughts flowing in all at the same time. But I
sat there, I listened to each thought, I witnessed my mind, and I didn’t move.
I fought every temptation that prevented me from being still… and just being.
What I realized is that even though it was really hard to
fight off these irritations and noises, the discomfort it brought to my
presence was temporary. The pain it was causing eventually disintegrated as it
lost all specific associations and became a simple sensation that no longer
could be defined as good or bad. Developing
a measure of detachment in my life has proven to be a valuable instrument of
peace. It taught me that if I hang on a little longer and ignore the discomfort
of (insert life situation here), it too shall pass, peacefully, without me
having to react, and having to become consumed by it. Because everything
eventually goes away.
I love writing and I will continue to write. But the way I used
to write before was not enough for me.
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