Grooves

All this time off and I have done almost nothing.  Well that is not entirely true.  I have worked a little (maybe more than a little), read some, watched movies and read most of the internet.  I am not sure what I feel like I should be doing but time is passing in my life without any real intent.  I am often really busy so some down time is not necessarily bad as long as I am living my life and not escaping from life.  This time off has given me the space to think more about my current downward spiral, a common phenomenon, and how once again to reenergize myself and propel myself in a different direction.   However, the thing I love to do most is to contemplate, strategize and determine the course for a new path.  The thing I am never able to do is actually implement and follow through on any of my well designed plans.  I am frozen and unable to put in the effort to make the change.  Why?

 This morning I was reading an article: Why New Years resolutions do not work?  

This is how it is with our emotional reactivity to life. Like attracts like. We will actually seek out and even the circumstances of life that will fit into the familiar neural grooves of our limbic brain. It is important that we stress this point: even if a pattern causes us to suffer we will (albeit often unconsciously) thoughts, feelings and actions that are familiar in lieu of the unknown, which to us seems more scary. Hence the saying, “Better the devil you know than the one that you don’t.”

I totally get this from an intellectual perspective.  I have taught myself ways to hide and become numb and they are the easiest choice at any given moment.  My brain prefers these patterns and prefers firing the neurons through these wide grooves created through years of my heavy use of these habitual patterns.   I get that.  I get that it takes maximum conscious effort and consistency to create these new patterns and eventually the brain will prefer these grooves instead of the old ones.  I get that too.   I just cannot hold on to the new groove for even a day.  

I find myself swearing to a course of action in the morning but by mid-afternoon I have already started to rationalize and compromise my once steely resolve.  I begin to think of tomorrow as the new day and why today does not really matter.  I am living my life for the resolve of the next day which leaves today empty and vacant of purpose.  Today does not matter is a scary way to live - given it is the only thing that really does matter.   I have been struggling with this constant lack of commitment and joined several virtual groups to try to draw motivation.  I find myself amazed at the strength and will of these random people, but it has not even tickled a small piece of me into action.  The ra-ra and the good stories let me know it can be done, gets me back in planning mode and the I am lost to the action.

The doing, the action is a hard one to solve and not for just me.  It really is just doing it but there has to be something that drives and keeps the commitment real.  I think the answers to why we hide and want to be numb in the first place are somewhere hidden in the understanding of suffering and ego.  I do not quite have my head around how to accept these thoughts as just thoughts, the mind as just another sense with perhaps too much  and that the now, the right now is all that really matters.