Day 9: Driven to distraction

Okay, one more reason why hope is stupid:  hope is a distraction.  As I’m healing, I’m trying very hard to stay in this very moment.  For a long time, that was because if I wasn’t in this very moment, I was reliving something very painful. My brain was caught in a horrible loop that only reinforced my fear and my hurt and my feeling that I am not enough.  It would play over and over and over.  I was literally re-minding myself, rebuilding my mind, just etching that experience deeper and deeper into my brain.  Doing myself zero favors.  Making a lot more work for myself now.

Obviously, it’s super fun inside my head.

My therapist, my meditations, my woo-woo reading all instructed me to stay in the present.  To breathe.  To notice that I woke up and that the sun is shining.  To feel the ground beneath my feet.  To acknowledge this very moment because it is really all we have.

Hope, on the other hand, calls me away from the present.  It lures me to anticipate, to imagine, to dream of a different way.  It turns me away from this moment with the temptation that the next moment will be better.

And yes, sometimes this very moment actually sucks. And the next one might, too.  But my goal is to embrace that suck and see what I can learn from it because moments are just that:  moments. They pass with alarming regularity.  Seeing them and feeling them is how we make a life well lived.  And when the sucky moments stop and the universe suddenly does you even the tiniest little solid, you get one of my favorite things ever:  delight.

One of my friends says that the secret to happiness is low expectations … and bourbon.  I agree on both counts.  Hope can be a cruel hype man, setting up expectations that fall short, disappoint, and wound.  Hope pulls us away from the work – and the joy – of the now and turns our attention to the maybe of the future.  It distracts me from my reality, my healing, and the people right in front of me.  I need to focus, and hope gets in the way.