Flight S.O.B.'s Unite!

Cherokee wisdom for today: "Lovely or unlovely, nothing stays the same.  It cannot.  It grows into something newer and better, or it gives why where it is.  Life is a living, moving force at every moment.  We would not have that change - but to live happily we must change.  We cannot allow ourselves to crystallize until we are inflexible.  There is too much to shatter us if we cannot bend.  To enjoy the present moment is to have the innate knowledge that the next one and the next can be even better."

The only constant in life is change.  I gotta adapt or it'll kill me.

I maintain - again - that One Day At A Time is a good basis for living well.  Right here - Right now.  If I had to base my existence on one concept it would be the imperative to be present.  Not in the future where terrible things are happening to me or in the past reliving the terrible things I did.

I am still obsessed with the workings of the human mind.  Maybe this is a type of control obsession.  Maybe this is because the human mind is such a weird-ass, unpredictable beast, making choices for reasons that of which we are blissfully unaware and running the show more than we'd like to admit.  If you think I'm making this up I suggest meditation.  THEN you'll see who's running the show.  Spoiler: it's not the You that you think you are.  It's this force that is darting and veering and screaming into the night.

I listened to a podcast that explored time and time management.  One of the central premises is that the people who struggle the most in this arena are those with too little time to get everything accomplished and - oddly enough - people with too much time on their hands.  The psychologist involved suggested keeping a journal where one logs personal activity separated into half hour increments.  I thought: "Why not?"  I'm one of those people with a lot of free time and I'm often surprised at the end of the day how much I accomplish and - more irritating - how much I don't get done.  It seems to me there's usually enough time to do all of my stuff even accounting for time-consuming chores - like grocery shopping and car repairs and house cleaning - as well as serendipitous interruptions - like a neighbor stopping by to chat or a phone call from an irritating member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Here's my take after a week or two of doing this: I am a fidgety, fidgety son of a bitch.  I have trouble staying on task for a half hour at a time with the result that it's not unusual to look at a segment, see a thing listed that should take fifteen minutes, and realize I don't know what I did the rest of the time.  Can you see why sitting still on a twelve hour flight is roughly equivalent to a root canal with no anesthesia?  Part of this, I think, is due to the fact that I have an overactive imagination and my mind is always flitting here and there, and part of it is because I'm unfocused.