I have so much free time that it’s challenging to find things to do and it ends up often making me anxious and unhappy. While when I was working regularly the monotony was making me anxious and unhappy. It’s ironic that the illness and cure leads to the same symptoms.

I suppose an occupation more fitting to my nature might leave me more satisfied even when regularly occupied. I hope it might be found some day. Or perhaps some degree of anxiousness is part of human physiology.

I’ve been studying practices for lessened reactivity and higher presence as means of less anxiousness and greater calm lately. I might try some alcohol reduction too, since it inevitably causes some anxiousness, no matter how it’s mitigated. And I’m trying to balance by diet with more red meats and fruits – maybe fish – to reduce potential nutritional sources of anxiousness too. I have a sense that the state in which I feel the most alive and least bothered, is when immersed in people, all working together. Even though I’ve never quite done it, nor know in what way I might pursue such a circumstances again. Failures have indeed affected my outlook.

Sleep is interesting. I quite regularly have subpar sleep. I keep craving naps, and I’ve kept finding them challenging to do. I used to knock myself out with starvation, but that brings with it all sorts of issues of its own.

And around and round it goes. I remind myself that I have food and health and shelter, reasonable safety, even a group and social support. Tim once described how the challenge in such a lifestyle becomes maintaining emotional stability – which I think might be true under some cognitive-attentional states, but which I also hope is avoidable under others, since it’s just so fucking boring (I’d rather not spend quite a lot of time… soothing myself). The abundance of time becomes paradoxically a source of discomfort for which there is not enough time to absolve. Tolle argues resignation to this fact – on an attentional level, I think: discomfort is inevitable, but paying attention to it might supposedly not be. It passes. I precede further discomfort by thinking words about how to avoid it; perhaps, I just find it challenging to distinguish grounded signals, like nascent hunger indicating appropriate eating, from ungrounded signals; which I suppose in itself is giving in to some kind of fear that one wont be able to satisfy ones need when they properly appear – and… die? How very fatalistic emotional (mis)conceptions can be. Tolle sorta insinuates avoidance of death fear by means of relating more to ones attention and it being part of all attention among other creatures whose embodiment is impermanent – so one can’t die (unless all life disappears, which is not indicated).

I do have a hunch sometimes that there’s an attentional barrier that I’m urging to breach through, at the other side of which there’s peace. Please.

Is it perhaps as easy as making religion out of slightly pausing at every event and then considering further action (if any) before response – that would literally be being attentional irreactive, after all. A constant practice – habit to form – by means of repetition over a long timer, sometimes fallen out of, but possible to move into again after that.

Seems worthwhile pursuit.

Continuing like this is insufferable, after all (imperative for change).