Today's Embarkation (albeit a brief journey)

How on earth does one find the time to simply sit down at Ye Olde Keyboard and whack out a blog entry on an average day when all one wants to do upon arriving home is stagger through the door, decant a reasonable glass of suitable wine, and then fall (preferably not face first) onto the sofa for a few blessed moments before the hysteria of the evening sets in? Or, perhaps more importantly, how does one arrange one's mind to the task when one has been absolutely tearing through a thousand other things that must be done at the computer first? This may be a project for Mindfulness. The basic exercise is supposed to consume an entire three minutes in which to compose one's self in order to then carry on without acting as though one's hair is on fire and the dogs haven't been fed. Let me give it at least part of that time and see where we get to.

Not quite three minutes later ...

 We shall rate the results of the basic exercise today as "some, but not all." It works best for me when there is virtual silence around me (those 3.7 seconds a day), but for now the iPod player in the kitchen is blasting out some Genius playlist of movie themes. They are heroic and evocative and don't encourage quiet introspection. One feels, rather, as though one should be wielding a sword, claymore, flintlock weapon or some such and doing brave deeds out of legend. Hard to quietly concentrate on one's breathing with all that excitement coming from another room. And I know myself well enough to know that, if I get up to address the musical distraction to meditation, I'll forget why I went in there and rearrange all the desert spoons or something.

The end of the calendar year looms on the horizon. The distractions of Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas and New Year are rising out of the mist like signal fires to guide the way. I have to tell myself that all that stuff I swore I'd get done needs to be attended to ... now.  Therein lies my present difficulty. My clerks have noted that there is no time in the calendar from here to the end of the year for special hearings. I've been trying to find time to force in appointments for me and for Mother that allow time to get to Archangel and back (where it feels as thought most of our appointments are these days). Then sit down and quietly and thoughtfully "blog." I still can not say that word with a straight face. It does sound so like the sound the dogs make just before something especially nasty comes up and onto the floor.  I also told myself that any public journal would not be a catalog of whining and complaining for general consumption (I can do that in my personal journals); so there is yet another shift of attitude to be done in the writing. Perhaps the challenge at the moment is simply to get myself to the chair in the room, not knock over the harp as I swing out the shelf upon which the keyboard resides, and just ... START WRITING.

 So, having addressed the question, we shall now move on. The more I think about it, the more I believe that those desert spoons need attention.