"Psychology"

painting by Felix Pasilis, Tucson backyard

Sunday morning, early, October 5, 2008
“Psychology”

It rained in the night and there are big heavy dense clouds coming in from the north. I can see them out my window. Altho blue sky with grey clouds to the west. And a hint of sunshine from somewhere, I can see the sunlight glinting off a tree branch. O now it is full fledged sunlight coming from somewhere, I can see the wall on Caren’s shed is lit up yellow.

Rain always transforms our climate. I woke up to an early morning in Adirondacks summer instead of October morning on the desert. It was like a wonderworld for me out there. The sky is changing in front of my eyes. The huge heavy damp rain clouds have now become white masted with wispy grey coming out of them.

I had a lot of dreams but don’t remember any of them. Just a feeling that there were people and experiences going on. O yes now I remember, Danny Blumen my high school boyfriend was in one of them, and maybe they took place in New York. And there was some drama but I don’t remember the story now. A big drama, something was definitely going on.

And when I woke up and was lying there thinking, morning waking up, thoughts drift in and out of your mind. I noticed for first time ever for me, when a thought came in which upset me, and I thought “O no! now I have to go thru this!” Because for last few days I have noticed, each time an upsetting thought comes in I can’t get rid of it. It is like stepping in a pot hole which turns into a black hole, it swallows me up. And I was getting annoyed by it. It didn’t seem fair. Random bad thought slips in, why do I have to be stuck with it like this! I felt so at the mercy at any random bad thought which crosses my mind. So this morning when an upsetting one entered and I thought “O no I don’t want this,” I assumed I would get trapped in it again like quicksand. But to my amazement the opposite happened. I actually watched my mind change the subject. WOW I was surprised. It was so freeing. My mind just moved on to another topic. I loved it. It gave me confidence and made me feel good. My optimism increased. My outlook on life brightened. I began to have hope I could work with my mind in a more sensible manner.

And later when I was having my coffee and toast outside in backyard at picnic table, when I began to think about a friend I had had when I first moved to Tucson, Lizzie. That friendship began off like a house afire but somehow went south, it didn’t work out. And I started to have conflicted thoughts. Instead of going down a whole long path with them, and getting worked up-- you know, remembering how it all came down, reliving it in my mind. I didn’t do that. I nipped it in the bud. I just thought “is it because I miss her and long for her, or do I just feel guilty?” I must have asked myself the right question, even if I didn’t come up with an answer, because the next thing I knew, I simply said to myself, “everything I did was right at the time.” And then I dropped it and moved on to another subject.

Never once in my life before did I simply say and think “everything I did was right at the time.” Usually I go thru a whole major court case. Where the lawyer from the other side tells the whole story from beginning to end, with every conceivable detail. Then my lawyer mounts a defense, looks for loopholes in the prosecutor’s case. And then long laborious evaluation and summing up by judge. And the case closed. But it never is case closed. It is always re-opened on a whim a month or two down the line. lol what a drag!

It was so nice instead of going thru all that to just say “I did everything right at the time,” and move on. Hahaha I actually dropped the case. I realize now I have no idea of the truth of the case. There are still unknowns and perplexities in it for me. But the long drawn-out court cases in my mind obviously never settled anything for me, else why did it come into my mind this morning sitting in the loveliness of my backyard. So I may as well drop the case in a few minutes. Since trying to settle it got me nowhere. Better just to say “you had a relationship, now you don’t, big deal, it doesn’t matter.”

That’s another thing I have been noticing over the past week. It seems like for the first time I am beginning to distinguish in my mind between the past and the present. I’ll start going over something which happened in the past, and all kinds of upset feelings will emerge. And then it will hit me, “but this is not happening now, it happened long ago in the past.” It just seems like that is grounds for tabling the whole discussion. “It’s not happening now” I say to myself. And the urgency and life goes out of it. It becomes a shadow of a thing instead of a thing itself. It saves me from it.

It’s as if my mind is learning how to be more constructive.