Breathing my Mind into Your Face

I hit the center of my left big toe on the corner of the bumper pool table and it hurts. I have felt the pain in my toe for 3 minutes. Why? Did I get used to the pain? Did my receptors react to the initial impact by sending signals to my brain that my left big toe was in trouble and needed to be protected? Is that why my brain decided to focus on the pain in my toe? Now it is feeling better and by the weekend I’ll have completely forgotten the incident. Maybe next time, I’ll hit my toe worse and it will bleed. Eventually, the pain will fade and I’ll move on to the next life experience. 

Moods are like that. Something will happen that causes me to think less of myself and I’ll go around that day thinking I suck at life. Then a good thing will happen and some happiness returns. What usually happens is my wife will mention something I did that wasn’t any good and then compound that into a further insult that targets something she hates about my human nature. Or my boss will tell me that nobody likes working with me because I make people feel like they fucked up and perpetually try to insulate myself from being blamed for anything. Or I’ll yell at one of my kids and make them cry. Then I start thinking about how imperfect I am and how I could be so much better if I only tried harder. If only I executed on the daily life hacks written on the whiteboard in my office, where I sit all day.

• Talk to someone
• Meditate / Mantra
• Service / Do Something Good
• Read Helpful Literature
• Work Out
• Write
• ENJOY IT

That’s a lot of shit to pack in every day with a full-time job and two kids. Today I’ve talked to my wife and co-workers, but this is more like ‘talk about life’ with someone. Which my wife and I did when we went for a stroll at the state park after breakfast with a buddy at the elementary school. What the fuck was that we talked about? Oh yeah, we talked about how our youngest is going to be more wild than our oldest and how he is a better athlete than our oldest but is afraid to show him up. The way he doesn’t want to be better than our oldest because he doesn’t want the oldest to realize it and feel like he sucks at life. Usually when our oldest loses at something he throws a hissy fit or he just quits midway through so it doesn’t go down in the stats as an official loss. He’s broken a Nintendo Switch along with a few controllers. His iPad has a big crack in it from when he nearly squeezed it to death. Their bond is beautiful but I sure wish my oldest wasn’t so much like me. 

No meditation today. No service work. No reading. I did walk two miles, so that sort of counts as a workout. I’m writing now. I haven’t enjoyed it. Fuck.