Sit Still & Feel

New Year’s Eve Day. From Christmas through New Year’s its been a light week at work. A graceful period with days off and shorter days and easier days as the phone rings less because everyone else is traveling or doing holiday things. The kind of days and weeks I hope for at other times of the year. I recall looking forward to a stretch like this.being able to come home early or stay home and the best holiday days when we are just at home and not visiting family. This week there have been many of those longed for days.

And I have been nutty.

All that time when life was too busy and I longed for these shorter days. Oh the things I imagined I’d do: I’d read, I read harder books that require concentration. I’d learn to use my I-POD. I’d learn to use my digital camera correctly. I’d learn to sue the new medium camera I wanted so badly but now suspect that I wanted because its way cooler than a digital camera. I am afraid to line up all these technology toys I have acquired in 30 months and realize I wanted them because I want to be the kind of woman who can use a digital camera, video camera, I-Pod, medium format camera and a Treo.

But there is something else going on this week too. I’m not sitting still to play with or learn any of these things. I am home; I have less work and fewer obligations. It’s not like I’m going to extra meetings or doing service instead. What I am not doing is sitting still.

Why does it take so long to catch on? To notice that while I say “sit still and feel” and I grasp that when work is busy and I am racing thru a work day that there is a bit of “feelings can’t hit a moving target”, now, when I do have time and space to be still, I am NOT. One of the reasons that sitting still hides or I hide the truth from myself is the Internet. I have the illusion that I am sitting and doing intellectual work when I look up say, The Lord’s Prayer in Latin. I think, hey I’ll learn this; I’ll learn to pray the Lords Prayer in Latin this year. I also now grasp what an addiction EBay can be. No, I’m not selling my clothes or buying someone else’s but I’m looking, looking, looking. It’s fantasy shopping. It’s living in the realm of possibility rather than reality and in fact it’s another—yet one more—way to not feel.

Twenty-plus years of recovery, therapy and likely a million hours of self-help thinking and the most basic piece still eludes me: Sit still and feel.