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Saturday 25 November 2017

Il Dolce Far Niente


to sit
to walk
to be alone
is no mean feat

phone on
telly on
"but I am alone!"
that's the con

What is it to be alone with yourself and have nothing to interrupt your attention?


Living in this world of almost constant interruption can be difficult and it's so subtle that we sometimes don't recognise the symptoms of living an interrupted life.

When I go out, walking, eating, exploring, I see people with heads bowed low, shoulders hunched, their attention utterly consumed by their phone. And I wonder if they saw that squirrel scarper up a tree as they crunched by on autumn leaves.

I wonder if they noticed the walker and retriever brush by them, narrowly avoiding collision as walker and phone wend blindly through woods, all attention on feet, then metal then screen.

I see so many "yipee, it's the weekend!" or "TGIF" comments on social media and I wonder what happens in us that we want to create this break between week and weekend. Is this another interruption? What is wrong with the week that we want to leave it behind or delete it all together. What associations are we making with our week and our weekend and, when the weekend comes what steps are we taking to delineate the two?

Meditating the other day and the phrase "il dolce far niente" came back to me from that beautiful film "Eat Pray Love". I wondered why this was making itself known and sat with it in the quiet for a while.

What came through were Luca Spaghetti's words which go something like this:
"You work too hard; you get burned out and then you come home and spend the whole weekend in your pyjamas in front of the TV. But you don't know pleasure, you have to be told you've earned it. You see a commercial that says "it's Miller time" and you say "that's right, now I'm going to buy a six pack" and they drink the whole thing and they wake up the next morning and they feel terrible."
I know this; I've been this and sometimes, if I take my eye of the ball, I become this again. I'm becoming this again now - it's remedy time!!



My self medication is super simple - it has to be - I have a low boredom threshold! It isn't easy though, nothing that's really worthwhile ever is.

I let go.

That's it - I let go of who I think I 'should' be or what I feel I must do; I let go of giving to others; I let go of promises I've made; I let others down: I let me down.

And in the uncomfortable tension of those transitions, after giving myself permission to be nothing, I find myself in the long out-breath.

Do you know that breath?

It's where everything falls away and you get lighter and lighter and lighter. That out breath is what gives the body space to breath, it's what gives the mind freedom to roam and, most importantly, it's what gives the heart room to feel


It's where you return to the very core of you and just sit and be with yourself, free from the wants of others; free to be free.

Get into your out breath - let go and become the being you can't quite see; the being who's hiding behind all the crud that's in the way of you simply being you.

With love, in the sweetness of doing nothing.

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