Freedom in the Falling Leaves

    This summer has taught me momentary living.

    What does it mean, anyway, that standard New Agey cliche: "live in the moment"?  Depends on who's doing the living.
 
     My hunch to take a break for the past month was a good one, because writing about these things as they were happening would have deprived me of proper marination time. 

     August transformed me in ways I could never have expected in my wildest daydreams of quantum leaps.  I feel liberated, energized, and renewed.  What makes this time different from all of those temporary moments of good vibrations that come and go with the day is that something is solid here, something permanent.  I've passed a point of no return, as if a wall magically appeared behind me to keep me from falling back into some fundamental old patterns of behaviour and thought.

     Before this month, I did a lot of talking about momentary living, and not enough living momentarily.  My whole life, I've planned.  I've calculated.  I've weighed costs and benefits.  Most of all, I've hesitated to choose.  August taught me decisiveness.

    What were these events?  At least one of them isn't something I'm comfortable blogging about in public due to employment issues: I'm almost certainly aware my boss is aware of this blog, and though I doubt she reads it much, I am very much interested in staying employed until writing can sustain me.  It's self-censorship, to be sure, but at this point, financial survival is paramount.

   Nor can I just open up a new anonymous blog for my writing, for two very big reasons.

    First, I was shortlisted for this year's Arts Hamilton 2010 Creative Keyboards Short Story Contest.  As such, I am starting to gain some publicity, and need this to remain public and in my name as a homepage. 

    Next, I am nearing completion on my novel, which I've tentatively titled Convergence. Again, this will require open and public awareness that Jody Aberdeen has a web presence. 

    I will say this much: I have had 31 days of high highs, one very low low, and ever since, a synthesis, a reconciliation that I feel has been penultimate.  There is no going back now to what and who I was before.
 
   So what is momentary living?  It's the simple division of your overall plan into smaller segments.  Each day has 1,440 minutes of 60 seconds each.  Too often, we get stressed out by the overall plan when it's measured in bigger chunks: weeks, months, years, decades.  We think that we have "wasted years", we should have been "further along" than we are now; we procrastinate on larger goals with long-count timelines because we think "lots of time between now and then" and thus create our self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.  By getting addicted to a long-count plan, we often compromise ourselves and doom ourselves to failure, because everyone knows that the big plans almost never turn out the way you thought. 

   But 1,440 minutes, of which you spend an average of 420 asleep, that's more manageable, because they are easy to fill, far easier than a decade.  Unlike those longer term goals, you don't have to wait with the moments to feel how you want to feel: you can feel it now, within 60 seconds of your decision to feel it. 

   How did I come to this conclusion?  A simple, beautiful experience, one that I have no qualms talking about.

    I met someone online, nearly a month ago.  We chatted online, dated for a time, and on the third date, headed out to the Burlington Beach on the last night of the month.  At sunset, wading in the warm clear water under a cloudless blue sky, she and I kissed.  That was a beautiful moment for me, one that seemed to last far longer than the sixty or so seconds of the actual duration of the embrace. Whitley Strieber summed it up best: "all kisses are forever".

    Two days later, we stopped seeing each other, and though I was initially sad, I felt, and still feel, energized and electrified from that kiss, which was a moment truly lived. I am ready for more.

    And many of those I spoke to initially viewed the experience as one part of a larger "failure", despite their best efforts to hide it with placations.  After all, the lovely young lady in question and I are no longer dating; it didn't work out in the long run, which is the stated goal of all romantic dating.

    None of that matters, because I was able to create a moment, and that moment lasts forever.  Living the moment means not living for specific results: it means experiencing what is at the time it's happening. And though it didn't work out, the experience gifted me with something else:  I now truly *get*, from experience, that old Eastern adage that every piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit only leads you closer to the piece that does.  I am grateful for what I've learned, and will put it to practice with the next romantic experience I have. 

    August was full of such experiential moments, not just romantic, and really, all of life is like that, if you choose to see it that way.  The choice is essential.  This doesn't negate the need to have a goal: as I said, you're just using a smaller measure of time.  And I have a goal and a plan, a new one that's really helped to move me forward, like a fresh breeze pushing canvas sails.  I'll talk about that later.

    I won't comment on September as a whole, not until it's passed.  I'll say this much: I look forward to enjoying this new sense of freedom in the falling leaves and chilly breezes and the earlier sunsets.  Fall has always been special for those types of moments for me anyway.  Lonely or satisfied, joyful or anxious, I look forward to them all.

   This is the start of something new.  I can't want to see where it leads.