Tag: Anxiety

Because tomorrow ain’t here yet, so slow down, slow down. Breathe .

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I’m going to ask you all to participate with me in this piece. This is going to be a communal meditation.

The poem ritual is about meditation. It’s about breathing. And it’s about seizing the day rather than worrying about tomorrow.

Today, you will. Today you choose. Today is yours. Today is only today, tomorrow ain’t here yet, so slow down.

I was interested in creating ritual because I live in Brooklyn, New York. And I rarely found a space quiet enough to meditate. And so this poem became a part of my meditation practice. And now it’s something that I do every day.

Breathe, for the homies that ain’t you, breathe, for the kin, that is. Breathe, for your own good skin, your skin, your smile, your you, you, you.

As someone who’s aware of her anxiety, the ritual became very crucial for me to just find a place to have deep breaths. And I think that it will offer that to the listeners as well.

Now come back. Come back. Come back to yourself.

I do say poetry is a transformative tool because I believe it allows us to use poetry as a mirror. And we can look very deeply and intently. We can study it without judgment and we can allow ourselves to grow from the things that we see versus the things that we thought we were seeing. Poetry allows us a step back, some distancing, and a lot of compassion.

Miraculous dark days, most fortunate sky be, beyond brilliant and be your resilience. But you do that already. Who told you any different, you tell them today you live and today you choose. Because tomorrow ain’t here yet, so slow down, slow down. Breathe .

— Mahogany L. Browne, “A Brief But Spectacular take on poetry as ritual” (PBS · Moe Sattar · September 30, 2023) Mahogany Browne is a poet, writer, organizer and educator. Recently, she became the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center in New York City. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on poetry as ritual.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Modern life has clogged my skull to the limit. Technology has delivered an avalanche of options to preoccupy me at any hour; the notion of idle time that can’t be filled with some form of digital distraction is foreign to me, almost unnerving.

If you’re reading this column on a phone, or any sort of computer, you’re seconds away from all kinds of diversions—social media, digital games, the state of your 401(k), the latest celebrity embarrassment or political mess…

For me, the problem comes when I need to think for myself. If you read this column, you know that any kind of complicated thinking is hard for me, and perhaps impossible. My brain’s interior is not a series of mathematical formulas dancing around balletically, like it does for beautiful-minded geniuses in the movies. My brain is more like a slop-sink faucet, slowly dripping. Or an arcade machine that only plays 70’s-era Pong…

As I get older, I realize I need to utterly unplug. My ideas will not come from my phone, a Facebook post or the latest tire fire on Twitter. For me, they come from digital distance, from oxygen and exercise and especially from time spent outdoors. There once was a time I could get ideas from staring at websites, but not anymore. I get them from looking at trees…

I fear we’re getting worse. Technology just gets better, as those airport bookstores get smaller. I’m wary of our artificial-intelligence future, and the notion that we will lean on bots to think for us, writing code, speeches and even poetry. It sounds like more off-loading of our brain space to technology. And to what end? To watch more episodes of “Love Is Blind?”

I don’t want to sound like I’ve figured it out. I’m not saying this brain of mine is on the cusp of a breakthrough. My brain will not save the world. It barely remembers why it went to the supermarket.

But to get anywhere real, it needs to be uncluttered. It needs to be empty. I mean empty more than the usual. It needs to be bored. And for me that means: unplugged.

—  Jason Gay, from “The Joy of a Totally Empty Brain. Modern distractions cannot compete with the inspiration of old fashioned boredom (wsj.com, April 21, 2023)

Here I am again. I’m full of faults.

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And I think that as I’ve aged, I realized everything is an ongoing process. And that it isn’t something that suddenly you’ve done this work and therefore you become enlightened, right? That you’re like, oh, you wake up one day and be like, oh, guess what, I don’t have an ego. I’m not bothered by anything. And instead, of course, it’s just the ongoing slog of being a human and returning to the practice. And OK, here we are again. That’s bothering me. Here I am again. I’m full of faults. […]

I usually sit for at least 15 minutes a day. Sometimes in the morning and sometimes at night. At night, it’s usually because I’ve forgotten to do it in the morning. Or I had something early, an early flight or something like that. But I try to start my day with it. I also try to do — set an intention every day that I just hold with me throughout the day. And sometimes it’s just like, oh, I’m feeling a little stressed out, and I’ll just say let’s just think about ease. And I’ll say, just keep saying the word ease and it comes up. And then my meditation practice — it differs. Sometimes it’s — I think the core is always love and kindness. That’s what I learned many, many years ago. And that’s my fallback.

— Ada Limón, from “Ezra Klein Interviews Ada Limón” (Ezra Klein Show, May 24, 2022)

we have an unstoppable will to go forward

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PS: It’s like every time i get pushed down and crushed, I seem to get more information…Parkinson’s had made me aware of time. Like, really aware of it. My sense of mission, my sense of this is what I’m supposed to do, that got much stronger in me. If I don’t do that, I start to think about “Oh, Shit, this happened to me.” “What a drag.” You know, it makes life harder. Then you go into this whole pity party thing. It’s a complete waste of time.

JH: Do you ever get into that zone, the pity party zone?

PS: Yeah, I get in it all the time, but I’m very fast at getting out of it. […] Because the whole premise of this is we’re not gonna win every time, we certainly can’t be perfect, we can’t control it, but we have an unstoppable will to go forward… Basically its the same goal, which is, “Schmuck, take action, no matter how frightened you are.”

— Phil Stutz & Jonah Hill, from Stutz, (Netflix, 2022)

Notes:

  • Lori suggested that I watch. I’ve watched it front to back 3x. Powerful.
  • Stutz: Rated R for frank language. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
  • NY Times Film Review: ‘Stutz’ Review: An Actor’s Tribute to a Therapist. In his documentary, Jonah Hill gently turns the tables on the famed Hollywood psychiatrist and author Phil Stutz.

Monday Morning Wake Up Call!

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It would be so nice, wouldn’t it? If something as simple as a notebook could change our habits overnight. Those blank pages. The physical representation of our fresh start. It’s almost religious. A sense of being born again. And this time, I won’t screw it up (cut to credits).

But I always did: screw it up, that is. It didn’t take much, particularly with diet and exercise – an unplanned slice of office birthday cake, or a missed spin class. A week could go from “new me” to “write-off” in the blink of an eye, the remaining days a sordid opportunity to revel in my failure, until Monday rolled around and I could start again (again).

Perfectionism. Fresh startism. All-or-nothing. Perfectionists aren’t great at swimming through the murky grey of slow and steady self-improvement, the kind that leads to meaningful change. Where inertia or regression isn’t failure, and it doesn’t take a Monday to get going.

So we diet then binge, buy new stationery, sign up to a gym and swing wildly between our new and old selves, wondering when our real lives will finally begin.

It was a relief, honestly, discovering that I was simply a victim of my schema, lost in a sea of all-or-nothing thinking inspired by a problematic self-improvement discourse. That the shimmering, perfect-from-now-on self I was reaching for doesn’t exist, because her story keeps going after the credits roll. While change is possible, it’s rarely linear. Any pledge for self-improvement that assumes we can sever off our less desirable personality traits is a lie.

I finally finished my book, the one I wish I’d read as a teenager, about a girl who discovers imperfections are part of being human and learns to see the world with a little more nuance. The process of slowly but surely reworking the manuscript into something that isn’t perfect, but is wholly me, helped reframe my thinking about meaningful change.

Is there such a thing as a whole new me? I wouldn’t know. Most days, I’ve stopped searching for her.

— Miranda Luby, from “Where ever you go, there you are: the myth of the whole new me” (The Guardian, August 21, 2022).  Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over by Miranda Luby is out now.