On ice

That's it, there's a growing list of projects where I'm 'nearly' there. I have two paintings about to be presented to a gallery on my debut as a professional artist (though I have painted two cabinets for a magician with cartoon characters, which could count). I have two articles now set up for the new year, and my TV debut as well.
I have to train myself not to look ahead at any potential bad things (as I tell my own clients), but it's a lifetime's habit I'm shlepping my kishkas out to break (see a Yiddish glossary...). Technically the week ahead is average, within what I know, and after the middle should be greatly improved. So I'll wait till then to see if the week was as mediocre as expected.

There is some unconfirmed very good news on my grandma, who has just had her hopefully final tests and treatments, that the tumour was actually benign. I'll have to check as it's not yet come to me directly, but if that's the case we can stop worrying about the source of any more symptoms she may have.

Otherwise nothing much has happened either way, which after a month from hell is probably a good thing. A bit of dead space has to be better after illness, hospital visits, huge expenses and a car crash. I've literally been stretched to my limits. To think I used to imagine once someone had passed their exams and got most of the foundations in their life things would settle down. The hell they do. Disaster and stress can come at any time in any form, and there's really no way we can prepare for them if they come so worrying in advance is a waste of time as I said. Yes, I still do it, generated like a little radio programme coming and going in my head as if knowing what to expect will somehow mitigate the results if it happened. All it does is create an imaginary set of disasters most of which won't happen, to ruin the bits where nothing else is going on.

So, where's the good news? Good question. If there is a way we can find an idea to hook into, like meditating on god or anything else that could take us out of the lions den of life though we're in the middle of it I'd like to know. Though simple observation is my official method, it doesn't have any quick results so though it may well be the best long term route to enlightenment, it's not a quick fix for the very blockages to it. As we're taught for hypnotherapy, a lifetime's habits can't be undone in a few hours. Actually, one or two at a time can, but not the whole blanket of emotional addiction we nearly all apparently have, until, like me, we have enough. But real, solid good news is pleasure first, business second. Business success can sometimes lead to pleasure, but anyone familiar with 'inappropriate feeling syndrome', where you feel happy at a funeral or a disaster, has proved a good state within is the highest level anyone can be on and are not affected by what happens outside automatically. The rest is extra.
I'll introduce a new concept now (to me, anyway). Entropy. That is the opposite of evolution, where something starts perfect and then falls apart until nothing's left. That's my inner being emotionally so far. I began perfectly happy as a small child, only upset by upsetting things but basically over a 20 year period bouncing back from any number of setbacks we all have at one time or another. Gradually the setbacks got bigger until they ate into my basic foundation of peace at around 25, where I started developing anxiety and started having a list of places I didn't like going to.

20 years later it's been up and down, but I do now realise I never had agoraphobia as I thought I could have, by just not being able to do a few things others could, rather than not be able to do almost anything which is the true condition. Thank goodness for that, at least. But to relate it to entropy and not myself, how many people start of thinking they're fine and OK, and then pick up more and more negativity over time until they develop a complex? That is actually the norm, people are happy and confident until life starts to knock it out, and then it can be hell's job to sort it out again. I say this as a therapist who does this work, and it's a depressing fact no one needs to learn how to be inwardly at peace, it's usually there and taken away or covered up. OK, we mature and learn a lot, but if we're not content or at peace all that does is make us very useful robots. I know I see myself add a growing number of insights into life that are often very useful to both myself and other people, but being right doesn't make you happy, as it's business. I remember when I was wrong an awful lot, but I didn't care. Now I can see intellectually many more things than before and make far fewer mistakes but none affects my quality of life, just my scoresheet, which has no connection with it. I think I'd be prepared to throw all my principles in the bin and plough through life like a bull in a china shop if I didn't care either way and was happy regardless. Now, I have a pinpoint attention to detail developed over years of college and further training and practice which does help me and others enormously in business, but if inwardly everything's all over the place I do wonder if one may even block the other, as well as certainly being independent of it. Maybe not, but I do know attention to detail comes in when observing the negative as well, when you spot details better not spotted, and realise possibilities better not realised, that as I already mentioned, do exist but rarely happen. But knowing they can are the seeds of madness. So yes, the sharpened awareness can drag the heart down in some ways. But no, I don't intend going for the lobotomy. It's taken me so long to get the brain trained up I don't want to waste it. But something has to be done on the heart and mind it connects with, as I'm fed up with the inner chaos that reflects the outer chaos. Of course, an end to the outer chaos would be my best start, and a piece of really good news on the pleasure front. I even have an item or two in mind, though unlikely and possibly even miraculous, but if any balance can come in after what a great commentator of the 21st century (my mother) described as a terrible year, I'll appreciate it 101%.