All Day Long

What is real life? When I was with Rose in Hawaii that felt very real. Being back here and in the muck, feels sur­real. Sur­real means to have the dis­ori­ent­ing and hal­lu­ci­na­tory qual­i­ties of a dream. It is easy to say that life is a dream or say that none of this is real. If that is true, what is the point? My attach­ments to things and places and peo­ple feel real, espe­cially when I lose the attach­ment or feel threat­ened. That is called suf­fer­ing. It is worse than pain. So what is the oppo­site or, at least, the other side of suf­fer­ing? What do i feel when I am here, expe­ri­enc­ing this dream and not feel­ing attached to it.

I expe­ri­ence suf­fer­ing as a deep seated achy fear­long­ingde­spair sense of being over­whelmed. The other side of that I think is trans­parency and light­ness. I have writ­ten about dis­so­ci­a­tion and the unbear­able­ness of that and obvi­ously I am not talk­ing about check­ing out emo­tion­ally here. I am talk­ing about check­ing in, about being there, here actu­ally. Savor­ing this moment as good enough, per­fect. Even though I think this is a great way to be and I have found myself in that space, I don‘t think it is any­more real than the suf­fer­ing. It just feels bet­ter. I don‘t under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of feel­ing bet­ter. I do lots of things to make my expe­ri­ence in this shell com­fort­able and pleasant.

How do I get to the begin­ning of the end of suf­fer­ing? I don‘t. I am always in the gap between this and that. The more I abide in that (like The Dude in the Big Lebowski) the closer I am to the answer to that ques­tion, and the less the ques­tion even matters.