20231213 - Accepting Silence

Stop protecting yourself from yourself. Surrender to what is real for you in this moment, no matter what it is. Don’t resist it, be true and be free. I’ll start. I found this moment almost unbearable, it’s so boring and in lack of distraction. I want the distraction because if I stay here I need to feel all of the anxiety of writing this piece. Feel all of the pressure from my mind to be clever and wise and enlightened and original and drown in the fear that I am not. I feel the pressure to be someone else than who I am. Now when I stay with this, give words to it and surrender to the fact of this moment I feel relieved. The pressure melts away and there is an opening. The need to distract myself is not so strong anymore and just staying here is easier. The discomfort that I was trying to avoid went away in 2 minutes of honesty with myself. There is something funny about that. My mind would rather choose an eternity of distraction and the lack of ease that comes with it, than to feel some discomfort for a few minutes. The problem with that strategy is that it is also uncomfortable and stressing and it leaves us disconnected from our lives. Blaise Pascal has something to say on the topic. “We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.” - Blaise Pascal, Pensées