by Richard
I’m waking up thinking about problems. They’re mostly day-to-day work pressures, deadlines and kids. Sometimes they’re about bigger things: watching the news, it seems that world events are especially challenging these days, and people are even more caught up in judgement or doubling down.
Sometimes the problems are felt as little annoyances, sometimes they’re felt quite intensely. But where do they exist? In the books by Charlotte Joko Beck, she says that they exist mostly within ourselves, living as little self-generated dramas somewhere in our heads or bodies.
But our bodies are made up of millions of cells, and perhaps they’re not too aware of all these problems. And inside that are the atoms – being mostly 99% space, and inside that are the electrons that exist only as probability clouds. Where’s the drama here?
Outside the window, the sun sets behind the gum trees, which are glowing orange. The night sky then appears – and looking up, the problems seem even more insignificant. Next morning, the weekend radio science show hosts an astronomer who’s talking about the time he pointed a telescope at a random patch of sky and found over a million galaxies in the image.
Across time as well – we’re in constant change through culture, environment and genes that stretch backwards and forwards, over a lifetime and millions of years beyond.
But today, there are things to do and issues to solve, which all gives me a slight headache: the problems feel real enough.
There’s one thing I’ve noticed though. After time spent sitting in the morning, problems seem less of a problem. It’s not as though they disappear really, but somehow there’s more acceptance of them. The edge is taken off, and they’re held differently. So where do the problems exist? Sometimes, I think of an Aussie expression that Joko may have liked: “No Dramas”.
So now, it’s time to get up and sit. After a while, there’s a small gust of wind in the trees, and drops of rain start falling on the roof. A couple of birds start warbling outside. No dramas.