Living in the Moment

It is imper­a­tive that I keep myself busy. Exces­sive down­time tends to make me surly because I think about myself too much. I get lone­some and with­drawn, I feel cut off from soci­ety. When I’m out and about doing crazi­ness, when I’m hang­ing with my friends, when I’m not stuck in my apart­ment, none of this mat­ters because I live in the moment.

This kin­da thing explains alot about me. Liv­ing in the moment. It explains why I’m not always the best about keep­ing in con­tact with my friends. It explains why I some­times just up and leave wher­ev­er I am for no appar­ent rea­son. It explains why I can focus on some­thing that grabs my atten­tion to the exclu­sion of all else. It explains my enthu­si­asm and my child­ish­ness.

I guess I’m this way because I am autonomous and there­fore respon­si­ble for keep­ing myself occu­pied and keep­ing myself engaged. This descrip­tion sounds a bit odd because speak­ing in this way sep­a­rates me from me. There needs to be a way to refer to one­self with­out being both sub­ject and object. The times when I get down on myself and the times where I am not suf­fi­cient­ly occu­pied are also the times I think I might not be up to the respon­si­bil­i­ty of being an autonomous enti­ty.

Sev­er­al peo­ple have men­tioned to me that I appear to dis­so­ci­ate between my mind and my body. I have giv­en this quite a bit of thought but haven’t real­ized any­thing defin­i­tive about it. I can see what they mean how­ev­er. I don’t talk very much about any­thing bod­i­ly be it sex, poop­ing or almost any­thing else. The two things I tend to nat­ter on about are my immi­nent bald­ness and my cranky knee. I spend much more time talk­ing about things that are mind­ful. Do I have a rela­tion­ship with my body? I think that I do. I try to take care of it, eat right, exer­cise, get enough sleep. I have abun­dant ener­gy.

But they might be right, because my rela­tion­ship with my body isn’t quite bod­i­ly. I give it what it needs and in turn it behaves itself, does­n’t get sick and keeps my mind rel­a­tive­ly unblunt­ed. So my mind appears to be sep­a­rate from my body because we have a con­tract more than we are uni­fied.

What does this have to do with liv­ing in the moment? Well for me, not hav­ing to think about my body allows my body to do its own thing and my mind to do its own as well. So I do bet­ter at sports when I let my body act inde­pen­dent­ly of my mind and I con­cen­trate bet­ter when I am not aware of being bod­i­ly. Whichev­er type of activ­i­ty I am involved in, men­tal or phys­i­cal, I am only real­ly present phys­i­cal­ly or men­tal­ly. Rarely, if ever, both. Per­haps this is why my rela­tions with peo­ple in gen­er­al feel so strained. It is quite per­plex­ing.