The importance of daydreaming and whimsy: How to distract yourself from worrying it's the end of the world #Mindfulness

The surreal is always fun. Ever feel like you’ve got a movie turning in your head? As if life isn’t quite real but a set out of a Wes Anderson or Jurassic Park or… Hitchcock film? I do. I’ve got the house in The Royal Tenenbaums softly imprinted in my exterior vision right now. It’s calming, gives me a break from feeling like the world is huge and small (at the same time) and that I thought I might have achieved more by now.

It’s hard not to be hard on ourselves. We live in a culture of measuring, celebrating and… quietly judging achievement/failure. I watched some wildlife today out of the window as I was pummeling through job applications with gusto. I wondered if we’d chuckle at the birds if we saw them waking up in the morning, turning over in their nest, reaching for their smartphone and checking their email/social media whilst bleary eyed, dry-beaked, half asleep. I mean, maybe birds just wake up and they’re ready for the day, ready to go go go. We might smile and feel a sense of sadness that they forgot to just put their head over the side of the nest and take it all in. I wondered if they feel any pressure to succeed. Be the best bird in their tree, maybe in the whole forest.

“Hey look — there’s Kristina.”

“Oh woah no way? I heard she did MAD good at work the other day, found 50 woodlouse, put them onto the exchange down at the creek, came back with a load of other grubs, some new twigs and these new leaves from another forest…”

“What…? Are you serious those things are like fkn wormcoin. They’ve been going through the..”

“Shhh here she comes.” [stifled tweet]

“Hi ladies, nice to see you, beautiful day hey?” [chirp]

“Hi Kristina, lovely to see you!” [animated chirp]

then quietly aside “Her feathers aren’t what they used to be though…”

Yep. Probably not. But hey.

Pressure. We do put ourselves through a load of it. At a basic level, it’s how things get done. If there wasn’t ‘pressure’ or the desire to succeed, we would still be rolling around in the earth trying to figure out how to build a spear to hunt animals, wondering what fire might be. I guess the secret is pushing from a place of excitement, passion, rather than fear, dread… Hang on, wait. I have a question. Going back to that spear thing. Why is it humans decided to start killing animals instead of just eating plant-based meals? What was wrong with the berries or nuts from the forest? I might not come up with the answer to that. But there is a choice right? You can either live on a diet of legumes and foraged bits and bobs, or you can spear something that might be able to kill you. Maybe it was that ‘kill or be killed’ thing and then they tasted it and thought, hmm, that’s not too bad. Would be better on the barbecue though, with a bit of chimichurri.

Omnivores. It’s all dynamic anyway. Like all things. We often think things are static, but they’re not. Everything everywhere is in flux, even if we can’t discern it by eye. And everything we can’t see, that’s moving too. Yep.

.. But I do see quite a lot of those marketed products out there today suggesting we eat powdered meal replacements. I don’t know if I understand that. If we’re not on rations, why not just eat the actual food that the powder is made from? It can’t be as good. Try feeding it to a dog. They’re going to look at you and say, “what are you playing at you moron, just give me the stuff I used to eat when I was a WOLF.”

I know people have busy lives, but are they too busy to participate in one of the oldest rituals in the existence of humankind? That’s cookery by the way. There are some others but I don’t feel it’s necessary to discuss those right now.

The inner dialogue takes a bit of careful attention to tune in to, but once you can pick it out and listen in, that’s when you can discover the place from where you’re pushing inside, and also, how easy you’re taking it on yourself. You know what the hardest thing is to do? A lot of people say to me, “ah gosh I tried so hard to do it, but I couldn’t. Not without laughing or crying.”

You should try it.

Stand in front of the mirror.

Look yourself in the eye.

Take a deep breath in… Now let it out.

Remember you’re you. Say your name.

Let yourself daydream for a moment.

Listen to your inner dialogue, but don’t interact with it. Just observe.

If there’s no dialogue look at yourself and really notice your features.

Try and keep that space open in your mind, where you’re just standing there, observing.

Keep on breathing.

Now say the words, “ I love you and I’m proud of you and I believe in you and it’s enough that you’re here right now on this earth, being you.”

Give it a go.

Actually fk it go give that a go right now. Stop reading this thing, go find a mirror and give that a go.

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Ok. How was that? Did it work? Let me know in the comment section if you actually did it or just skimmed through and then clicked on ‘How to make a billion dollars in 3 seconds’. Ok, let’s go on.

I don’t understand littering. It’s never made sense to me. I saw a whole load of trash strewn across the path I was on today. No, not a metaphorical path, an actual path. Seeing this beautiful cluster of unashamed nature contrasted by these pieces of man-made non-biodegradable crap made me wonder… What sort of situation a person could be in where they’d think that was ok? Maybe they were having a really tough time, sleeping rough there and decided that it was ok to leave their rubbish behind. I’ve been working on my empathy and compassion recently. I didn’t see Kristina getting indignant about it though, I wondered if she had the facets to care or whether she was more intent on just figuring out how to survive.

So, it’s going to be Friday soon. Tomorrow beckons. It made me wonder, have I been taking the certainty of sunrise for granted for too long? Imagine if one day the sun went on holiday and was no longer there for the earth to orbit around (yes I know, suspend laws of physics etc) and we woke up the next day expecting sunlight and it was just darkness… And we wouldn’t see the moon because the sun wouldn’t be there to light it up. I guess it must have been a pretty big celebration back in the primitive days when humans weren’t sure if the sun would definitely, 100% rise.

“It’s super dark. How long is it normally dark… for?”

“Depends, depends how much you manage to eat before you fall asleep. If you have a big dinner then sometimes your eyes close when you feel tired and then when you open them again, the new day is here.”

“Oh. And what’s that up there, that light?”

“Oh that’s another thing. It changes shape. Sometimes it’s big and bright and lights up the whole place like the sun. But sometimes it’s small and it barely makes enough light for you to see anything.”

“Wow. Do you think the light will come back so we will be warm again?”

“I don’t know. But let’s try and eat a big dinner and maybe it will arrive quicker.”

I’m not sure if that’s 100% how the conversation might have gone, but I think it would have been along those lines.

I wonder if I’ve taken a lot for granted in life so far. Every now and then it’s nice to remember that in spite of how hard things can seem, there’s also a lot of good to be celebrated and cherished.

Also, we get out what we put in.

I thought I’d write this piece of whimsy just to introduce a few things that I’ve wondered about. It isn’t intended to be a serious discussion, there’s enough of that in the world; it’s a distraction. If you like this, please clap (wherever you are in the world). No I mean press the clap icon thingy. I’d like to write more. If people enjoy them, I’ll make more of them.