Focus

For some reason, I am periodically hit by phases of blurriness. Not so much visually - though acuity is sometimes an issue due to changing prescriptions and whatnot. Not... this is more of an emotional and mental haziness. A kind of soupy, pokey, obscurity that seeps into my everyday living until it feels like my pores are inhabited by an ethereal and intangible sludge.

Being a bit of a control freak by nature, these states of foggy personhood tend to unnerve me. I start to panic when my mind won't focus clearly or my memory shows signs of serious deterioration. Anxiety overtakes me when I feel less alert... when my usual, wakeful and sharp sense of awareness becomes replaced by what feels like someone else's sluggish and all-too-lazy brain.

Perhaps it's a biological holdover of some kind, brought on by snowy winter weather and a primordial desire to fall into a dreamy, warm sleep - letting the ice and wind talk itself into spring. Maybe it's some emotional stuckness linked to the affective quicksand of February - a month predicated on the notion that time really can feel infinite while life subsists in a sort of dark, interminable stasis.

Whatever the reason... today I have decided to reframe my relationship to this lack of focus. Heretofore rattled by such a mental shift, I have decided instead to embrace the loopy-ness. My agitation, I would guess, stems from an attachment to my (erroneously) perceived sense of in control and my inability to allow multiple definitions or styles of focus.

My little "i" self says: Hazy is not okay. Foggy is right out. Down with blurry wishing. Out, out with forgetting and dropping and missing and mistaking! Distraction is failure.

And today big "I" glanced up from its peacefulness, laughed a little and said, But why? Why assign the label of failure to a natural and uncontrollable state? Why worry so much? Why punish yourself? Who are you failing? What have you truly forgotten? Fog and clarity: they are ultimately one.

Sometimes the beautiful balance of life hits me, and I am humbled by the innate paradox of complexity and simplicity contained in even the smallest of moments. There is peaceful being made possible when I no longer impose a hierarchical categorization to the many-ness that may be. In other words... my tendency to order, to label, to assign along a spectrum and wield some internal pendulum of judgment actually limits my experience by cutting me off to the possibility that any point along whatever aspect of duality I travel is no more good than it is bad. It just is.

And so today I am hazy. My mind feels like the turtle in Aesop's fable, and my heart feels thick. Life is moving at a slower pace right now - or at least, my experience of it remains snail-like and deliberate. Maybe for good reason.

May you allow yourself to slow down when needed. May you embrace whatever pace you now travel without judgment or self-recrimination.