As I introduced yesterday, this (lunar) month I’m embarking on a quiet journey focusing on sense of self/Self and how I/we get things done.
And of course how that interacts with the other four aspects of: interdependence, other people, freedom from oppression and better planetary futures.
I’ve been asking the question gently in the background of my meditation every morning for the past couple of months - Who am I? Who?
(This has led to my delightful Ordinary Mental Consciousness providing me with two earworms - one from Les Miserables and the other from Muppet Album 2 which involves Zelda and her singing owl. Yes mind, good pattern-finding!)
I thought I’d sit down and write a wild and shaggy list of some of the places I may be looking at over the next month. Feel free to join me in some of them and add others…
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Where is my sense of Self? As in, who am I outside of my random set of personality traits? Outside of trauma responses and the collection of mental/emotional patterns? How do I find her whilst swimming through the waves of despair and fear and gloom that try to keep us lost on this shadowed planet?
What eternal parts of me can serve as a lighthouse in this foggy world?
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Whose eyes do I view myself through?
Who am I as a friend? And who taught me to be that kind of friend?
Who am I as a partner? A lover? Where did that learning come from?
Who am I as a leader? Who did I learn that from and how much did I decide ‘for myself’?
How do I know the above is true? Is that the kind of friend/partner/lover/leader that it’s right for me to be?
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What is it like to let go of some of my wantings and think about serving what the world needs?
There is a constant tension between wanting to be fiercely placed in the intensity of the time I have incarnated into and the longing underneath my escape fantasies of either being (a) a wise little baker running Meg’s Place (‘When it’s gone, it’s gone’) (b) a hotel jazz pianist or (c ) the hedge witch living on the edge of town.
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What does it mean to be living in a time where society says, ‘Put your oxygen mask on before you help others’ and ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love someone else?’
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How does my sense of self affect how I look at interdependence and complexity, and experience it, and navigate through it?
How does my sense of self affect my relationships with others - with people I have a relationship with, with teams, with organisations, with politics, with the human race, with non-human people?
How does my sense of self affect my fighting for and nurturing a present and future free from oppression?
How does my sense of self affect my involvement in better planetary futures?
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What is it like to be a glorious eternal soul living in the body of a monkey?
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And how does allll of this express itself fractally in what I get done and how?
A snapshot of me getting things done:
I’m writing this right now on Sunday morning in a Google Meet with a friend I’m growing a lovely new relationship with. Having a witness and travelling partner always helps me.
I spend a lot of my days with one of my besties/siblings either WhatsApping her my list and my progress through it or jumping on Zooms to co-work together. Plus cajoling each other through cooking, cleaning, moving our bodies and getting early bedtimes.
I spend a lot of Monday triaging all of my inboxes, noting the tasks down in my (kind of) bullet journal, then planning what can actually get done this week.
I am VERY affected by how I feel, much as I long to be one of those Productivity 10x Pomodoro 5am Club Just Eat The Frog robots.
I just had a breakthrough with my meditation instructor a few weeks ago, one of the outcomes was finding a way to be… upstream? from my up-until-now omnipresent anxiety.
What that means in my working day is I’m building a muscle that allows me to live from that upstream standpoint, which then means I can ‘get more done’ and be more present.
I have post-its on my wardrobe in my bedroom ( pictured above!) that remind me of the key areas of focus I’ve signed up for in my day job, and the areas that maintain my sense of wellbeing and connectedness and the… chord of notes I want to hold in my non-work life.
I’m on a 78 day Duolingo Spanish streak, but I haven’t touched my piano in six weeks or finished ONE book for my Read Harder 24 book challenge I signed up for in Jan.
Time! Space! Sleep! Relationships! Food! Duty! Fun! Grief! It’s a lot to balance.
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Then there are questions like:
How much do I pay attention to the pain of the world as portrayed through the Doom and Panic machines, and how much do I ‘just’ do the work that is given to me to do (and how does that affect my sense of self and how I (think) other people see me)?
Many areas of inquiry.
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Oooh which leads me to a more meta question:
How do I want to approach this inquiry? How do I keep it linked to who I am/want to be/the world needs me to be and the work I’m doing in the world?
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Right now I feel a sense of deep quiet and a well of energy to be embarking on this journey.
Join me in a month of asking: Who am I and what am I doing?
(Oh god, that sounds a bit too close to home to how things really feel lol. I’m changing that to be the title of this post!)
Very happy to hear: how you get on, podcasts/writing/tiktoks that made you think, where you’re sharing your investigations.
With love.
Another world is possible.