On Terror

I'm living my life in near constant terror right now. I'm not at a point where I can say publicly why, but it's the largest decision I've ever made, and I'm losing a lot of security with it.

Everyone craves security. It is, perhaps, the predominant biological impulse in us: safety/survival. Most of our decisions are made with that single idea in mind. This is why people stay in jobs they hate. I've never met so many miserable people as those in the workplace, going in day after day, for years and hating their company.

I think about the word legacy a lot, or at least I have been in the past couple of months. I don't say legacy in a grandiose, arrogant way--but simply, what will I be remembered for?

Climbing the corporate ladder? Powerpoint decks? Leadership in growing a corporation? 

In business, you're constantly trying to add value, which simply means making sure the word you do is beneficial to the company. During this existential crisis, I'm asking myself where I add the most value to mankind? Is it behind a computer, looking at spreadsheets, and presenting ideas to upper-level management? 

I can't say that it's a complete loss. It allows people to have jobs and customers to be happier. But, what if I was a mechanic and decided to go bake cakes instead? Sure, I'd still be producing something the world wants, but where would my value add be greatest? Where could I do the greatest good for the most people? Under the hood of a car, not wearing an apron. 

In the end, we're all dead. So what am I going to leave behind? A full bank account and a bunch of regret? 

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, of course.

A lot of the people close to me are nearly ready to block me on Facebook, and deleting my number/asking me to delete their number. This is due to meditation and my obessiveness with spreading the benefits. That's okay--I don't really like them anyway. ;)

Actually, everyone I know who has started really does enjoy it. They say it's hard, but they can tell there is something to it, something happening in their minds. However, like most people who start a book, they do it once every ten days. (I know this because I stalk them ruthlessly through the Headspace app). 

Meditation is the greatest investment I've made in my life, but once every ten days isn't going to get you the type of happiness, contentment, and peace that you're wanting. I'm not sure if enlightenment is possible through meditation, though supposedly the Buddha reached it--but I do know that you won't ever near it unless you're meditating daily. I'm not talking about hours a day. I'm talking about 10-20 minutes. 

Taking 10 minutes and concentrating on your breath. Forgiving yourself when your mind ventures elsewhere, and coming back to your breath. That's it.

Someone asked me the other day how I have time to write and meditate, combined with a full time job. I asked them if they had time to eat. You make the time for that what matters most.

Take ten minutes, every day, and start concentrating on your breath. When your mind wanders, realize it has wondered, and bring it back to the breath. In that moment, you're both controlling your mind and practicing a very real sense of self-forgiveness, both of which will transfer over to the rest of your life.

Not Meditating? You're Wasting Your Life

Those that are close to me know that I'm kind of an all or nothing type person. Angry with the government? I'm not going to vote for the lesser of two evils; I'll just never vote again. Want to be  healthy? Forget good carbs vs bad carbs, just sacrifice them all. Want to write novels while still having a career? Just work fourteen hour days, every day.

I've taken this obsessiveness and found a new outlet. I'm having a real tough time not telling everyone I know about it. I basically prosthelytize for it on a daily basis. 

Meditation.

I've been high strung since a child. I can remember riding the bus at like nine and detailing out my entire day from morning until night. I told one of my friends about it and he looked at me like I was insane--I could tell, even then, that he thought I would surely end up in a really tight jacket in a really white and soft room somewhere. That OCD turned into a fairly high level of anxiety as I grew older, until I found myself on like three different type of pills to manage it. 

If I wasn't on these things: I. Freaked. Out. I'm talking, we'll probably have a nuclear holocaust within the next six months, and we might want to go ahead and buy ten billion gallons of water (not that bad, but you get that point).

About a year ago, I started researching meditation some. There was some science coming out saying that it had really powerful benefits, and I'm all about science and benefits. Science with benefits is how I like to term it (get it?). Anyways, I started. Very small. Five minutes a day.

The road to where I am now in my journey was VERY rocky. I plan on talking about meditation more and more on this blog, and I don't want to act like this has been an easy travel. I went through long periods of not doing it, of a longer period of not understanding, and so on and so forth.

However, this week, for the first time since I was about twenty-two years old, I'm getting off my anxiety meds. I've tried this before and the results were horrific--like I begin to feel that Vampires are living in my closet level of anxiety (not really, but you get the point). This time though, I'm more confident in what I'm doing, and it's only due to meditation.

I spend twenty minutes each day trying to focus on my breath, and those twenty minutes have brought a larger return on investment than anything else I've ever done. 

So, I suppose, this post is me singing meditation's praises, because I really want people to understand what it does.

We'll continue to discuss; how to do it, what it does, why you're an idiot if you're not doing it, etc.

Probably Shouldn't Have Written The Singularity

I'm about 90% positive that when I go wide with The Singularity (meaning, I start putting money behind the books in marketing), negative reviews are going to pour in. I kind of considered this when I started writing it, but didn't care. 

The book is dark, much darker than The Devil's Dream--and that's saying something. The Devil's Dream, at its core, was a story about love and maybe redemption. The Singularity, at its core, focuses on one question: does humanity deserve free will? It's not a new question by any means, and if I add anything to the discussion, it might be a different view of the extremes to both sides of the answer. 

In doing that though, the book became very, very dark. And the whole time, I tried to stay true to what I wanted to add to the free will discussion--that humanity can be a very, very evil thing. That maybe the case which says we shouldn't be allowed free will is actually stronger than the opposite. I couldn't do that with redemption. I couldn't do that through love.

I couldn't stay true to the story by creating heroes full of hope, and villains who necessarily lost (no spoiler alert, because I still don't know how the thing ends). However, people hate this stuff. I got a one star review today because the story was too dark. I don't care about that, but I just wonder if economically, was it a dumb move? Maybe.

I had to write it though, I think. I needed to see it through, for myself, if no one else. Why can't people dig dark, depressing, novels with little to no redeeming characters? ;)

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