![]() Sometimes I wake up, but it's terrifying so I go back to sleep right away. ![]() I'm asleep when my professors are talking, asleep when I go to the store to pick up milk. It never wakes me up, but I spend $3.50 on it anyway. I'm asleep when I go to school, asleep when I'm telling the barista which form of caffeine I prefer. I rolled out of bed, put on my slippers, and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. I woke up this morning for three minutes. I was being desexualized in slow motion, becoming a teddy bear with breasts. This was distance passing for connection. The litany of excuses he presented in response was comic in its tragedy: "I want to get to know you." "I don't have a condom." "I'm scared, because I just like you too much." He took an Ambien and fell asleep, arm over my side, and as I lay there, wide awake and itchy in my lingerie set, it occurred to me: this was humiliating, unsexy, and, worst sin of all, boring. On Valentine's Day, I put on lace underwear and begged him to please, finally, have sex with me. Maybe it would feel just as good as sharing a bed. I wouldn't have to pretend like I did with other guys. There was something tender about him, broken and gentle, and I could imagine that sex with him might be similar. I was twenty-four and he was thirty-three ("Jesus's age," he reminded me more than a few times). ![]() Success was a scary thing for a young person, he said. He warned me of the life that was coming for me if I wasn't careful. I stayed with him while he had walking pneumonia, heating soup and pouring him glass after glass of ginger ale and feeling his fevered forehead as he slept. We took a hike in Malibu and shared ice cream. Another way to make this happen is by returning your whole attention to the present - to what's happening now, in this moment, and this moment, and on - within yourself and around you. If you watch yourself honestly, in a detached way - not guilt-tripping yourself when you screw up - you gradually learn where it was that you were just blundering along, reacting sort of mechanically, and being asleep even as you were in your waking day. ![]() 'Know thyself' has been an honored ancient teaching, and it's still a cornerstone of the world's greatest philosophies. So, how do we get to the better quality of attention? With attention! That is, we turn our attention on our attention we start by trying to see how we don't pay attention. This quality of attention doesn't make us hesitant, or slow to decide, particularly - just as the flashlight doesn't make us hang back on the trail. Our attention is our 'flashlight.' So it's all about how much and how fun an attention we consciously bring to life. It is like the faculty of attention - if we turn our full attention to something, we learn more about that thing. If you have to walk along a dark mountain path, don't you prefer to have a flashlight to shine on the path ahead? I would suggest that it is possible to have that flashlight in life all the time. ![]()
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