I am listening to “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” by Theolonious Monk and WOW it’s making me feel like I’m in a movie / being viewed from somewhere up above as I sit and try to write my way to some sort of summary / some momentary truth.
Sometimes it’s helpful to put in your headphones and imagine your life as a scene. Let it be some big important thing that’s leading to something else big and important. Imagine this, even if you don’t feel like it. Imagine that the whole world knows it but you don’t. To you, it’s just another day writing.
It’s how I trick myself into remembering that my life is being lived right now by me, only me.
Your day right now? This phase, this job, this state you’re currently in? It’s not some preamble.
I often feel like I’m in the just-before stage, waiting for the job and the money and the partner. Waiting to fully love myself (“oh it’ll come soon, once its spring and it’s warm enough to run a lot and once I’ve saved up money to buy a new car, a car that really feels like me, a soft green one”), waiting to feel like I’m in it or making it, wherever and whatever “it” is.
It’s an unexamined belief, ^right there^: the belief that “it” is not here.
When I finally start to ask myself some questions—like is that true and who said so and how do you act when you believe that thought and could it possibly not be true and if it's not, then what truth remains in its place? (Some of these questions are loosely based on Byron Katie’s “The Work”).
Theolonious Monk is helping me fill that place with a different truth (perhaps a truer one), where there’s not an “it” I’m after, instead there’s an “it” that I’m living—now and tomorrow and yesterday, too. The piano is reminding me to look up and feel holy for a moment, here in my sweatshirt on this windy November day, reading emails. I look up and I feel like I can see myself from above, and I’m aware of life in a way I rarely am.
It’s helpful to remember to see it / look up / feel it bubbling inside of you. Because it’s always there, but we’re rarely conscious of it. It’s here—life, you. In all your sleepiness, confusion, aches, breakfasts, frizzy hair days—right here. I want to listen to more music that makes me feel that way.
Thoughts / prompts:
What do you listen to to remind you of life, of beauty?
What other tricks do you have for remembering that your life is being lived, right now?
How do you ask your truths if they’re true?