A meditation practice to reach down and stitch me to my authentic self, on the daily. An extreme exercise regimen to force me out of my head, and into focus on what an exceptional, marvelous machine my human body is. A physically expressive discipline — martial arts or dance — to describe in space the emotions which the body in motion can convey and invoke: visceral audience connection created through intentioned movement. Ancillary to all that: the healthy daily weedpulling of Ego seeds, which daily donation of the self to (at least) one loved and cherished discipline ensures.
Giving oneself to something Greater ensures the pruning of the virulent Ego. In the safe space thus provided, the seeds of Calm can grow.
This calm, this deliberateness, this life-by-design is central to me. I have inherited a life of chaos and my aim is its opposite. I have the life goal of being a warrior poet; of living authentically in each moment with no distance at all between my interior self and my exterior. I have shorthand images in my mind for this honest existence: sailing fast and free with a child of mine unselfconsciously joyful is one. A child of mine, standing straight and tall on a zipping-fast boat, laughing clearly into the salt spray. That is a scene of happy victory to me.
The image of myself investing careful hours into calligraphy, into art, with no anxiety whatsoever as to the passage of time. That’s another image of what success will look like.
The sense of me in an expansive place unfamiliar to me: a wild mountainside or a foreign town square, solo and bold and blown away, taking it all in. Curious and expanding my experience of the world. And happy.
In my sacred imagination, I know how winning looks.
* * * * *
Yet Chaos this morning bid for victory. It disrupted my sleep at 0300, coming for my calm.
So. I am writing this post at 4:30 in the morning.
Writing a post was on my plan: I need to know what I think, what I want, so I can chart my path from here to it.
Writing it at this hour was not.
But if Chaos wants to dictate the time, still it cannot disrupt the plan.
The plan resumes when I take stock of my surroundings and arrive back from disruption and survival-activation, back into the present moment.
* * * * *
In the present moment, where am I?
I am in a city largely unfamiliar to me.
There is a sine wave next to me on this guest bed. My visual plan.
Ah, right.
My creation of it has been admired by a physicist. Not for the mathematical brilliance of my diagram. But because this drawing represents the wiliness of my tenacity. Of how far and detailed I am willing to go to ensure I accomplish all my components to move forward; all the daily time*effort components required to advance my life towards its goals.
This plan is modular. It is adaptive.
It is the physical symbol that I will never quit. I will invent whole new methods to chart time and adapt actions: I will get the steps to my goals accomplished, and I will never quit.
Physical health is the foundation.
That accomplished, financial health is next.
On that foundation, career health can be built. Businesses, people-saving projects.
* * * * *
So far, I cannot get even to financial health: the riptide of chaos keeps pulling me backwards. This is the reason for this new plan.
So far, meditating and athletics barely happen, much less rehearsal for a physical discipline: fighting happens instead. It is a hard life when time invested in my own health triggers a survival fear in others. When time spent on myself is seen as a threat, as a retraction of resources others feel they require of me in order for themselves to function.
My own survival instinct is normally triggered in response. My life force is stolen; I freak out and grab for it back.
I don’t need to do that anymore.
I just need to be able to recover faster.
I need a plan I can pick instantly back up after a disruption.
* * * * *
Chaos can be planned around. It can be accounted for.
It can be mastered and a strong life built despite.
* * * * *
The sine wave is beautiful. It describes the peaks and the valleys of my energy throughout a day. (the two-o’-clocks are the lows; the eight-o’-clocks, the highs.)
Beneath it, on this sketchpad, I have drawn a circle which is a pie chart. Midnight is at the top and noon is at the bottom. In bright markers, each wedge is colored by energy level (Meditation is cool purple. Business hours-work is hot yellow). That’s in addition to being labeled not only by activity to be performed in that hour, but why that activity.
Chill meditation first. For the purpose of connecting with myself first thing, to therefore make decisions from my root of wisdom throughout the day. (The alternative is to take reactive actions throughout the day based just on local events, rather than to deliberately make considered choices on planned trajectory towards deeper life goals.)
Warming athletics-in-nature next. To connect with somatic wisdom and the joy that is housed in the body; to connect simultaneously with the wild beauty outside of man-made spaces, and have Ego broken open by being put in its proper place: subjugant to Nature and dependent on it. (The alternative is to dive straight into paperwork of some form and climb straight up into the left frontal cortex, home of worry, doubt, and depression, which are roommates to the reason we visit the LFC: it is also the home of logical abstract (paperwork) thinking.)
Hour by hour, the modulated-temperature circle and its analogy, the spooled-out sine wave, continue.
* * * * *
It’s an idealized wave, this temperature plan. Its smoothness is a fabrication. Life itself will never unfold this elegantly.
But the charting of my average day reveals hidden patterns. It reveals Chaos where it lives. Certain hours are Chaos’ hunting times. Certain heat indexes on the temperature map indicate times in the cycle when, like a hurricane feeding from daylight heat off the Gulf, Chaos will feed on the higher energy of the time-of-day, and thrive. At my expense.
So planned activities at those high-energy times can be predicted to be the first to be disrupted.
Through Sharpie marker and sketch pad lo-fi, the invisible is yanked into conscious revelation, and thus manipulability. (The basis for all magic spells: If you can name it, you can control it.)
Social-facing things are first to go, when chaos rips me off this schedule. When my own survival-fear is triggered, calm communication is immolated. Professionalism is incinerated. My ability to focus on promises or tasks burns away. Into ashes disappears the calm demeanor required by a culture where upward mobility is dependent completely on how disciplined ones moods and actions can be.
So, you see, discipline of the level I’m designing is a revolt. If chaos comes, with this modular plan I can evolve from merely counting the hours it cost me, up into delineating which hours it cost me; which activities those hours were meant to have accomplished. Then I can replace not only the time but the chores originally meant to go in that time.
I can catch up the progress Chaos steals. Despite its best efforts, I can continue to advance.
* * * * *
With that assurance, I can relax.
I can fucking relax.
When Chaos comes, no longer do I have to panic; do battle with it on the spot to be the one to dominate the resources. To survive.
Rather. I can be conscious of plenty; of sufficience. Of abundance.
Of time, of steps-to-goal, of intelligence and persistence and my other attributes to get to target.
I can be abundant as water.
Like water, I can let Chaos wade into my life. I can give it all the temporary time and attention it thinks it needs from me. It can stand in my world as long as it wants. Now I know my schedule can flow around it.
All this strategy takes is complete commitment to achieving my own modular activities without fail and without stopping. To replace the Chaos with what it displaces. Relentlessly.
The Chaos is finite. It has a fixed cause and it isn’t forever and we are disarming it more and more, daily. Unstoppably.
Like water, unblockably we will erode the Chaos just accidentally; just naturally in the course of our flow over it towards our own goals.
(The enemy’s gate is always down; water always flows downhill; water always finds its own level.)
* * * * *
The last step is to find and enlist Trusted Others to keep me on my plan. As I’m getting the hang of it. To keep me unmolested while I practice not getting enflamed; as I practice thawing and flowing my life into something that can nourish me and others.
By design. I need protectors and guardians as I learn to discipline my life into my own design. A design by which I can consciously, predictably connect; can grow.
If there’s a higher art form than designing the dance of life itself, I haven’t encountered it.
So bring me your best shot, Chaos. I’m not afraid of you anymore.
Let’s dance.