like in a dream

I sat in front of the corner store where I get my coffee every day--sounds bougie, but it's only a buck if you bring your own mug--and I remembered something that reminded me of something else that led to something else.

First, I got up at about 8:15 this morning--using "natural rising" as my mom called it in her convent days--and did some yoga before walking down to the store. I've fallen into this nice routine in the past couple weeks, but I'm always fiddling with my morning rituals such that they never actually become rituals. But I remembered something that some loathsome impish man once told me (a teacher at Price Elementary on the south side of Chicago): you should wake with enough time such that you have an hour of get-ready/downtime before you have to leave. An hour. Before work. I'm going to try to keep this timeframe in mind however my routine shifts, but for me it's more an issue of keeping to just an hour, not more.

And this line of thinking made me think of a TED talk or a NYT article--ironically, I can't remember--that posited that unstructured periods of "rest" help the brain process and store the information it's taken in and helps the brain access more remote memories--almost like dreaming but more grounded in reality.

And that made me think about meditation. To me, that's the goal and benefit of meditation, which I got back into this week. And the M-word shouldn't be confused with a particular practice or theology but just as a period of consciously giving your brain rest so it can defragment itself. I think we all do this in different ways but are rarely aware of it. For me, I think I got good at it through playing the piano--improvising specifically--and now consciously try to access that state whenever I can: sitting, walking, biking, and even driving. This week, I feel more centered and am having an easier time accessing this space. Last week, I felt like I was just running from one thing to the next and couldn't see the forest for the trees.

And this led me to think about procrastination, which I define as "avoiding doing things that are difficult". To me it feels like a mental block, like I can't even imagine doing whatever it is right now. And this block like a cancer grows. So if you avoid doing the dishes (which I do), then you avoid other dumb things that seem unimportant but really are. The action is more of a symbol than discrete act, symbolizing our ability to overcome our shortcomings. Writing music takes a lot of different abilities, and when I ignore the ones that are difficult to me, it comes out sounding 2-dimensional. The best music springs forth through a perfect collaboration of all the parts of the brain (or all the brains in the band) and then engages all the parts of the audience.

Gotta do the dumb things I gotta do.