Fully Present.

There is no doubt that I am a contemplative.  I think about EVERYTHING, and I do it a lot of the time.  This presents me with a problem in relationships.  I am there, but I’m not there.

More than one person

Here’s a thought exercise.  Can a person actually be more than one person at a time?  What if my present person were to think of my past person and all that the past person was experiencing and feeling and even thinking of at the moment?  Would I not be both the present person and the past person all at the same moment?  Here’s a mind bender, what if that past person was thinking of the future person it would be, and the present person were thinking of that past person? Ad infinitum.

OK, so I’m sorry if I scared you, but this is how my brain works and functions most of the time.  I love thinking and playing mind games with myself.  I go through the mental exercise of taking scenarios and ideologies and opinions to their extreme logical conclusion.  In many cases, these conclusions are scary.

The logical conclusion

A show my wife, Kristin, and I started watching on Netflix was Black Mirror.  This show is definitely not for the faint of heart, and some scenes are quite disturbing.  It intrigues me because it takes ideas to their logical conclusion, and the conclusion can leave you wondering where we are going as a society.  Watch Season 3 trailer below.

So back to why I write.  When I think and think and think, I miss the present.  I miss being myself, as I am at this very moment.  Life passes me by.  When they say “stop and smell the roses”, they are really saying, be fully present, and don’t worry about tomorrow.  I know that my wife misses it when I am not present, but somewhere else.  So I write.

Creativity

But what does writing have to do with anything?  Well, writing, journaling, and even creating helps me process my thoughts.  I get stuck a lot of times inside my own head and I can’t get out.  Expressing myself creatively gets the thoughts out of my head and formed into something that didn’t exist before.  If God is creator and we are made in his image, then we are made to create.

Being creative helps me connect with my wife, because she is not having to fight for attention, she is able to connect with who I am right now.  Life, for me, is better this way.  I get to live the all around life, fully alive, fully present with my wife, whom I love.