Upgearing

changing gears

When it is not asleep my conscious mind is like a sports car. When I wake up in the morning it is like switching on the conscious part and letting it idle. There is awareness of a hazy but mainly equanimous mental chatter about past, present and future.

Eventually I open the eyes and let the daylight in.  This morning the sunshine was powerful and still low slung. If there are no calls on my time I often just lie there enjoying the fact that there are no calls on my time.

I am a recovering workaholic and it is good to notice that there is now only mild guilt about lying in. These days, more often than not, I partially stop the chatter by being mindful of the breath and thus landing fully in the present rather than in the past or future. I think of this as flat backed meditation.

Back in Sept 2007 I blogged about ‘how to start your day’. There were options for engaging body, mind and soul first thing in the morning. I quote – “Why should you bother with any of the activities? Because otherwise you will most likely become physically, intellectually and spiritually wasted!”

I have not been pedantically methodical in the intervening six years but all is not forgotten. These days the morning mood tends to be equanimous and there is no self-ish urge to DO correct things. But I get up and stuff happens.

Some of the stuff is functional and practical – wash, dress, shop, cook, eat; some is social where I interact with individuals or  groups either face to face or via ICT; and some is spiritual and creative and involves sitting, reading and writing.

A regular part of the daily routine these days is to get the sports car into first gear while I check the email and Facebook and then the online news in Google and in the Guardian.

And then, on a ‘good’ day, there is a shifting into the second gear where insights arise, the third gear where elaborations emerge from the unconscious, and the fourth gear which deals with creative writing and editing.

Gears 2-4 are the ‘flow’ gears through which the muse speaks. The 5+ gears are for just sitting and knowing ‘the peace’. These days I think of the peace of sitting as a reward for having generated wee stories in flow mode. This is such a story. It took about one and a half hours to appear in its final form.

So what else is going to happen today? It would be cool if a visitor to the blog was to make a comment on this post. There is presently an average of fifteen visitors per day.

[Hint] - There is a ‘no comment’ link at the bottom of each post. Click on it and a reply box will appear.

http://dodclark.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/how-to-start-your-day.html