That’s what my uncle calls it when he’s getting ready to talk and you are getting ready to listen. I should say next that this post is by me, for me, and directed at me, so it will probably be very boring to you. You’ve been warned.

I’ve noticed over the last several days that I feel like I am moving through soup. Since I had that insight about distracting myself from my reality, and how I could just change my reality. Here we are, I don’t know how many days later and I am still not changing things. Every night, I write down a list of things I want to accomplish tomorrow and then I don’t do them. I get up and drink my coffee while reading social media. And that would be an okay thing to do IF, after I finished my coffee, I got the hell up out of this chair. But I don’t. I poke around here and I poke around there and I look down at the time and I have spent the entire morning on the internets. So I get up and I meditate, and then I come back.

Oh, I’m doing good and reasonable things. Chatting with distant friends. Writing. Earning a buck or two. Playing Words with Friends, or Alzheimer’s Prevention as I like to call it. But I am not doing the stuff I meant to do on this school break and that is really beginning to bother me. Which is a day late and a dollar short because classes resume on Tuesday.

I am somewhat puzzled by the fact that during the semester I get things done, and I am pretty focused and on task, but lamenting the fact that I don’t have time for personal projects, and YET. When I do have time…I don’t use it very productively.

Why is that? And is there any possibility at all that I am actually doing productive things, but they just aren’t things I can see? I’d like to think so. But I can’t be sure, because the list of stuff I am not attending to is long. Very long.

SO what has that picture got to do with this post? Not sure on that either. Except that today, as I was surfing tumblr, I came across this Mindfulness in Plain English, the whole text, which has been on my “want to read” shelf for awhile. And there it is, free.

And then, The Lotus and the Lily. I started off really strong with that, but I have petered out in week 2. I thought I would finish it over the break as well but I haven’t. Of course, I thought I would have a lot of alone time over the break, too, and that did not happen. It seems like someone has stayed home from school every single school day. And over Christmas when the kids were supposed to go to their dad’s, not all of them went. Which I knew would happen, but I didn’t realize how derailed it would make me feel.

Which brings me to the next question. Ok, set of questions.

• Why am I never alone?
• Why does it bother me so much to never be alone?
• Even when the only people around are ones I gave birth to?
• Where is this waiting for the other shoe to drop feeling coming from?
• And if I want to know that so badly, why am I absolutely refusing to sit down with paper and pen and write until I get to the answer?
• How can I disconnect without disconnecting?
• How can I make goals and yet remain detached from them?
• How can I let go of the anger over an incident and still use it as fuel to move myself onward?
• What is the point in all these questions anyway?
• If I find answers, will I finally be spurred on to self-directed action?
• Would it be okay at some point to retreat? That particular verb in that particular sentence does not mean back up. It means to go on a retreat. I could have said go on retreat, but I want the emphasis to be on the retreat, not the going.
• When?
• Where?
• How?
• And this choking sensation every. time. I. eat. Is this a new permanent thing, or just a side product of whatever is going on internally, which I am refusing to look at?
• Dear God. I will be out of school for reals in 20 months. I’ll be out of worth-while things to make myself overly busy with. What the hell is going to happen then?
• Wait a minute. Did I just hit it? Is it possible that school for me is intense enough that I need the disengagement between semesters? Because I do still remember what I wrote here: Social Work is not for Wimps.

And please, if you stuck with me this far, don’t think I am …….unhappy. I’m not. I’ve just noticed that the gleam is off. Like my happy is getting rubbed the wrong way. And I want to know why that is before it becomes my norm. Because that upbeat top-of-the-world me? I like her. A lot.