Stop! In the Name of Love

Produce:  To bear; bring forth; create; yield.
Stop:         To cause to cease motion, activity, etc.


One of the most important things that meetings did for me at the start -- and by "start" I mean "right now at this present time" -- was simply to make me sit down and shut up and stop my ceaseless, restless activity for an hour.  I had the same disease that Grandpa Simpson had, as diagnosed by Doctor Nick, where the skeleton tries to jump out through the skin.  I don't remember the name of the condition at this point but I clearly remember sitting in a chair, fighting the urge to get up and run 100 yard sprints or lift weights (well, not lift weights, c'mon) or do anything physical so that I could feel like my skeleton was going to stay put.  And, of course, I got to the meetings at the last minute so that sometimes I had to thread my way into the middle of a row to find a seat, with people in front of me and people behind me.  It was a suffocating, constricting feeling.  But I never sat in the first row.  I was afraid that my skeleton  might escape and leap at the chairperson, which would have caused quite a ruckus.  I've been to several thousand meetings and I've never seen a chairperson get leaped at by someone's skeleton.


A lot of time today I close my eyes and try to focus on my breath so that I can actually listen to what people are saying.  This is hard because I don't really care what people are saying unless it has something to do with me, which it almost never does.  People aren't thinking about me -- they're thinking about themselves.  But I do love it when someone says "I liked what Stevie Seaweed said."  That gets my attention.  I really perk up when I hear my name.  However, most of the time my brain is engaging in preparing brilliant, insightful remarks in case I'm called on to share or reviewing what I've said and wondering how I could have improved it and why it is that everyone isn't saying: "Man, that Stevie Seaweed hit the nail right on the head."  I don't have a hammer which is good because my ability to strike a nail is poor unless by "nail" you mean "my finger."


Sitting quietly doesn't seem to be productive to me.  It's very, very difficult to do.  I can always find something else to do than to try to sit quietly.  But my experience is that if I take 20 minutes and sit quietly and listen to my breath, trying to calm the cacophony in my brain to a dull roar, that the results are very productive.  It's just not a vigorous action requiring a lot of movement and effort which seems so damned productive.


Damn it.