Merry Christmas everybody...

[cybermule]

Bloody hell - got into work this morning, and my office had already gone tinsel crazy. People kept trying to get me to strew sparkly stuff over my monitor, but I was only persuaded to concede to a single bauble, hung on the Aloe Vera plant on my desk. It's my "christmas cactus", neatly illustrating my ambivalent feelings towards the festive season.

Actually, this year doesn't seem like it will be quite as bad. I hesitate to say that the festive season couldn't really go downhill. The past three Christmas' have been atrocious - 2000 involved my brother and father beating each other up in living-room, 2001 my sort-of-step-dad-in-law died, and 2002 was the first time I'd not seen my parents. So, Christmas = not a good time. Plus, it's unbelievably commercial and crap.

This year I seem to have made a compromise on both the socialising and the commercial-ness. Unless I can think of a definite present, I've only bought people fair-traded luxury consumables that won't add clutter to their lives. I'm not sending many cards, and I'm going to cut right back on the socialising. I need to be available for my mom and brother this year, and to be honest, I'm getting fed-up with racing up and down the country trying to make everyone happy.

I've actually managed to wrap some Christmas presents too. A very busy weekend for me - Saturday was spent at a meditation workshop. I was expecting it to be a bit hippy-ish, but it was run by an ex-psychiatric nurse who'd become a buddhist monk. We spent the day slowly building up to doing calming and awareness meditations, then a sort of posititive happy "loving kindness" called metta. I really enjoyed it. It was supposed to be non-religious, but a lot of the little quotes from Buddhism that the teacher used were neat. Two particular ones that stuck with me were "and this too shall pass" (very handy for someone like me) and that all of mankind's unhappiness could be put down to an inability to see the transience of the moment. Or something like that - I'll have to look it up!

Anyway, I don't want to become a buddhist, but I might try to find out a bit more about the ideas. They sounded appealing. And I'm definitely going to schedule in a bit of meditation. I should have been a bit braver - there were questions I wanted to ask, but I found one woman off-putting (excuses...excuses :p). Anyway, I wanted to find out how little meditation you could get away with to start with, and how you knew that you weren't becoming a know-it-all, if you were only supposed to seek internal validation.

Saw a film in the evening - Intermission - it was pretty neat. Spent Sunday taking my mom shopping and helping her to get through all her paperwork. I really dislike her neighbour - he's always talking about how he'd like a "crack at your mother". In front of his girlfriend, too. I told him that I didn't even want to know that he was thinking about it. I don't know if I'm being judgemental, but his relationship with his GF makes me uncomfortable too. It's definitely sexual, but with a reasonable amount of knowledge on the subject, I would say that she has moderate to severe learning disabilities. I'm sorry - maybe it's just me, but I find that kind of exploitative.

I also think my mother has a boyfriend. That makes me sad - I'm not ready for that yet :(

On the positive side, I'm quite happy. I've done most of the work for applying for that freelance job I probably mentioned last week. I need to read through and refine, then convert to PDF and mail it away. I'm still enjoying work - I got a really nice mid-year review from my manager, and I'm making progress on the boring-form-from-hell that will give me a promotion. This seems a successful job - it's the only one where my work and home persona have been even slightly close, and that means a lot to me. I hate that yawning gulf that I often feel between the different aspects of my life, and I think I'm slowly losing that. Possibly due to dragging "work Hannah" into my private behaviour, possible just due to finding the right job, possibly due to giving far less of a shit about a lot of other people in life. Whatever reason, it's a good thing.

Oof - I wrote too much. 3:34 and it's already dark. Bugger this English winter weather.

Comments

[apel.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I wanted to find out how little meditation you could get away with to start with,...
Ten minutes a couple of times per week will give you some benefit. It's a lot like physical exercise in that doing it more frequently helps more than doing it rarely but for longer periods of time. The analogy can be carried further. For instance it's not uncommon for people to be discouraged when they don't get results within a week of starting or to overdo it and end up feeling spiritually bruised.

... and how you knew that you weren't becoming a know-it-all, if you were only supposed to seek internal validation.
Know-it-alls seek external validation by bludgeoning others with their knowledge so I'm not sure I see where you're coming from with the question. Am I missing something?

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty icon :)

Ten minutes a couple of times per week will give you some benefit

Ah - thanks. I'd really like to do it more, but then if you really have to do a certain amount, then I'm going to find it stressful on weeks that I really can't fit it in. Not that there's much excuse for not managing 10 minutes, but you know what I mean.

so I'm not sure I see where you're coming from with the question

Hmm... I've been thinking about it a bit more, and I think I meant "complacent" rather than "know it all". The thing that worries me is becoming too confident in my internal validation when really I'm doing the thing for the wrong reasons. Kind of pulling the wool over my own eyes to justify my actions, you know? I guess you'd avoid that by becoming more self-aware. Also, I wouldn't want to end up not doing something because I was just hiding behind the whole "transience" thing. I guess that's another "self-awareness" issue :) Actually, thinking about the thinking about it, I know I have some emotional issues around feeling sure of my own moral (for want of a better word) judgements, so maybe it's that that's bothering me.