As I was shivering beneath the sunrise, bundled up outside this fine and dandy morning, sipping on a steamy cup of coffee, while chewing on what I should write about. I just up and realized that I was grinning from ear to ear.
At first I didn’t know how to put two and two together, but soon the mindful recognition of a few month long frown finally turned upside down sent a current of kinetic joy throughout my soul, even as far down as my toes, and back up to the ends of my right index finger and it’s neighboring thumb, and a pencil in between.
And in that one simple instance of grace this fine and frigid morning, I again knew what it felt like to be happy without any attachment whatsoever.
It had nothing to do with any particular circumstance. It was not because of any individual person whatsoever. It was for no good reason at all. In fact, I’m not sure that there is anything at all rigid and concrete that actually triggered it.
And that—to be 100% honest—is the absolute unblemished beauty of it all. To be in a holistic state of happiness was like a long-awaited gift that had been lost in another dark night of my soul.
Such are the 2020’s—the darkest days of humanity’s soul—insofar as I can tell. Are they not?
But this smile in itself symbolized a sort of unforeseen awakening of someone I thought was lost forever in the darkness of spiritual and mental solitude.
That someone being myself.
You see life my friends, unfortunately, has a way of unfairly delivering blow after blow in the form of trivial little tragedies, and is very formidable in its equitable approach with its worldwide distribution of pre and post traumatic stress syndromes it places upon all of us, more so than ever over the past two years.
And certainly my pain and suffering will never be anywhere near comparable to the pain that others in this world have endured, but the very nature of pain is absolutely relative to the individual lives of each of us, and even those we touch with our own.
Pain has its roots buried in all of the moments that represent the deepest suffering and heartbreak we have each uniquely and individually experienced.
It is a broad and variable indicator represented by the highest points of peaks and the lowest trenches of valleys, right smack dab in the damn middle of all the unpredictable events that make up the sometimes untimely timeline of our short-lived little lives.
And for me—like most everyone—to climb back up from that lowest point has been a deeply difficult process with many mental trips, slips, and falls along the way.
Because in my search through the wilderness of my own life for what they call contentment, I climbed upon the highest of highs in an attempt to prove that I could still conquer the world however it needed conquering without any suffering confusion. Only to try and prove to others that my world hadn’t completely collapsed due to the choices that I have made.
And to possibly prove to myself I was still worthy and deserving of living a content and happy life to the fullest of extent no matter what happens. Know matter how much my ego tries to get in my own way.
Because still, no matter what I did, those highs were fleeting, very much temporal, while becoming fewer and farther between, and the lows often drug on with forever in tow somewhere lower than what you all call—rock bottom.
And in the wake of the never-ending waves of anxiety and temporal pain, I found myself imagining, and then, fully giving in to the belief that happiness is just an imperceptible state of mental relief from a life that will always seem impossible to endure, especially today as the ink dries upon this page today.
I began to accept that once you have experienced shame, pain, and humility, maybe life would always be arduous, with the brief moments of fleeting happiness needed to sustain the desire to keep going through this confusing thing in a fluid, forward, and positive motion.
And all of this, is as to why such a simple moment of seemingly unattributable happiness mattered so much to me this bone-chilling cold, but crystal clear and beautiful morning.
It was like a little hint of what’s to come.
I was finally able to see again when I opened up my eyes up to the unwavering hope of a better day, something that I had seemingly given up on as of late.
Because I have been overly distracted by externalities out of my control, and because of that I haven’t been paying as much attention to my own shortcomings and loose ends, at least much as I should be.
That my friends, is complete honesty.
I wasn’t mindful of the fact that I had to regain complete control over all the mental distractions that often stand right in front of me, in the form of myself, my heart, my responsibility as a single parent, my job, and my own ongoing creative thought process.
And to be in a state of continual clarity—day in and day out—by practicing mindfulness in a world chock-full of distraction, is in itself, an awfully arduous journey.
Because distraction in every last one of its forms is an addictive force, simply because it allows us the opportunity to avoid all of the deep-seated pain and suffering by focusing on something outside of us.
And that’s the thing about distraction — it’s nothing more than the avoidance, of what we must really focus on, healing ourselves holistically, which all begins my dear friends with mindfulness.
Mindfulness is an investment in fully believing in, and fixing ourselves. Mindfulness forces us to be alone with our thoughts, and through a sort of metaphysical osmosis, to eventually come to terms by addressing our own pain, rather than avoiding it and projecting it onto something, and/or someone else.
So when I caught myself smiling this morning over a delightful cup of joe in the first waking moments of a brand new day, smiling for no good reason at all, except for one, that being the fact, that I am alive and I am still breathing, so there is hope yet.
Because with that smile, I realized that all the joy that I thought was fleeting in life, what I thought was lost in the shadows of mental ruin and suffering forever, was in fact just waiting for me to welcome it back to the light and reaffirm my hopeful mentality that everything is going to be just fucking fine, if we do indeed believe that it will.
And so it is, if you take anything at all away from this brief little mindful post, I hope it makes you smile.
That is all for now. Go about your day.
Til the next time,
Ryan Love
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