I Get Lost

Yesterday was one of those mornings where the sky was so beautiful that I had to stop the car and watch. I am never sure what I am watching for. It just seems like it is a moment that is too amazing to lose. The colors yesterday where pink and blue and there was a shade of light and awe mixed in that I have never found words for. Perhaps it is a lightness that only the clouds can come up with. Anyway, I just had to pull over, stop the car and watch until it felt like I had absorbed enough of it. And then I just moved on into my day.

It has occurred to me over the last few weeks how easy it is for me to get lost in whatever is going on in the moment. And like watching the colorful sky I just let the moment flow through me and I begin to take on the colors around me. This all works well if the colors are a brilliant sky. It is not so wonderful when what I am absorbing are the feelings and perspectives of things around me. Most of the time I can sort through the mundane moods and emotions that people throw around. However what I am discovering is that the scripted emotions that present themselves on TV, in movies, or in books are a bit harder for me to separate out from myself.

I get lost in emotional tales that are not my own and lately it seems that I have set up a perfect life for doing that even more. I have separated myself from the sensitivity that I have to all of the background things in life. I have stepped away and pretended that I can be different. Or perhaps more correctly I am pretending that I am not different.  For me (and many others) the world is a busy place of unspoken words and emotions that are flying around like phantoms. We feel them, yet we can forget that they are there and allow them to become part of us.

My mood can change in an instant. I have always thought that I was a difficult moody person with a tendency toward crabbiness. What I am finding is that I am too sensitive and a lot what comes out of me is not something that may have originated inside of me. I am definitely feeling what I feel; I am just never certain that it is something that I am committed to. Over the years I have developed ways to test for this. I look for attachments to these emotions: places where they originated in my life. I have to be careful that I do not nurture and cultivate these feelings as they will gladly take up attachment inside of me. If I do discover that the emotions are not mine I can walk away from them. The trick is staying aware enough to realize what is going on.

I have not been aware lately. I have been slowly creating a life that has pockets of dullness that I can hide in. This has left me open to the mood swings of the planet and perhaps today I have decided that this is not where I want to reside.