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 I get lonesome and withdrawn, I feel cut off from society.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.