I feel good in a special way, I'm in love and it's a sunny day

Christmas approaches and the days leading up to it have been challenging to say the least, but not so terrible, either. Still, I'm hoping the next several days are laden with comfort and holiday cheer. Not such a tall order, but given the impermanent nature of every aspect of life, I'm not counting on it.

I don't say that with bitterness, although there are whispers of it there to be sure. It's okay, I'm aware of it and keep it in check. Our society is built around the notion that we can craft a life of security, of things staying the same. It's like trying to subdue an ocean wave with a net, but yet we continue on in the erroneous belief that it's possible.

I've been grappling a lot with the reality of impermanence lately. My spiritual practice has helped provide balance and insight. Instead trying to capture the wave, I'm focusing more on riding it. My success rate has been uneven, but fuck it, I keep trying.

I don't really want to get into what challenges have come my way but they haven't been easy. There have been times lately when I've wondered if I'll even make it to Christmas. I don't mean to be dramatic here, despite appearances. It's just that things have been happening that have been coming out of left field, as they do, at such a rate that the message is clear: Nothing stays the same, nothing lasts.

With that in mind, my aim has been to not dwell on the negatives in favor of the positives. For example, yesterday my roommates and I cleaned the house. We started in the morning and didn't finish until around six o'clock. Earlier in the week, I had reached out to Fred & Evangeline about doing some cleaning over the weekend. I wasn't sure what to expect, but they both were on board. So yesterday we went to town on the place, with the help of Fred's girlfriend, Emily, and made it look better than it has in years. We threw a lot of stuff out, did some redecorating....it felt good getting so much done. And it felt even better knowing I could have still been mildly depressed and somewhat resentful of the filthy state of our apartment if it wasn't for the action I took to initiate the change.

It was a long, productive day. At the end of it, I was looking forward to watching a movie, playing music, relaxing. I went to my room and started to make my bed. My iPad, unbeknownst to me, was under one of the blankets. When started pulling them off the bed, the iPad fell on the floor. When I picked it up, I saw that it had a long hairline scratch down the middle. Shitty, but barely perceptible. Then I saw that the there was a dent right where the volume control is. More shitty. Then I realized that it had dented itself into the mute position and wouldn't budge. Fuck! Oh, and then I read online about how to pull the dent out - someone had the exact same thing happen to their iPad - and basically I made it worse. The end result: a small patch of spiderweb fractured glass around the dent.

I use my iPad a lot, so this sucked. No more Garage Band, no more music, no more Netflix (can't watch on my PC for very long before my computer crashes), no more podcasts. I almost made it a full year with it. My mom had surprised me last Christmas with it; it was a great gift.

The thought struck me, as it sometimes and thankfully does in the early stages of something like this, that what would happen if instead of being bummed out and angry at the world for fucking around with me, I made the conscious decision to not heap any more shitty-ness onto an already shitty event? Would it even be possible to dispense with all of that? Maybe?

Well, not maybe, but yes. We can't control the events of life but we can decide how we're going to react. And the best time to decide is in the early stages when worry and stress and everything else that accompanies the bad things that happen haven't grown sturdy as oaks. So, I gave it a shot but it wasn't easy. It wasn't so hard, either. I just had to keep on top of the thoughts that crept up about how crummy this loss was.

I reminded myself that this one unfortunate event was threatening to overshadow the accomplishment of a thoroughly cleaned place. In times of strife, all of things that have gone right tend to get stamped out in our minds, like the never happened. I went downstairs and practiced yoga for a while. I had some energy to burn, despite having spent hours and hours cleaning. Throughout my session, thoughts about my iPad swam into view, but they didn't stick for very long.

Oh, you do what you can do. Everyone alive on this planet is subject to impermanence, to the rising and falling, the giving and taking. None of us are immune. I try to remember that when thoughts that the Universe has a vendetta against me leak out. I'll see about getting the iPad fixed or getting another one. May take a while, either way, to happen, but who knows? Maybe St. Nick has something up his sleeve.

Peace.