I should be sleeping...

but I'm posting instead! W00t. hehe. I start the new job tomorrow morning-I'm excited. I've already done all my little wacky things-like figure out what I'm wearing and set up the coffee pot so I just have to hit "go"...and now i"m sitting here staring at my blog.

Hm..

I did some meditation tonight-It's been one of my goals to get back into it-mainly because it does wonders while I'm in the waking world.

It's not just soothing and relaxing and all of that. It's baring and revealing and when I'm "on" I find that I can learn things about myself that I wasn't really aware of. It's sort of spooky sometimes.

I've been thinking a lot about the ideas and value structures I read about in Robert Pirsig's book. There's also a friend of mine who talks a lot about self betterment and the idea of personal growth. Some people either have it or they don't.

Which may sound a bit harsh, but really. I really believe that you're either in this life to make the most of it and learn how you can improve or you're not...and it's not always intentional. I don't think that many people really make the choice to stay in their one facet of life.

I think a lot of it has to do with a person's basic upbringing-what they were exposed to when they were little. And, it whether or not they were encouraged to be curious as a kid. This isn't always true-people in my family that I know had perfectly good opportunities to explore and be creative and learn new things and they adamantly refused and continue to refuse not to take them.

You compare that to some of the people in the world who literally came from nothing but knew that there had to be something else out there and it makes me a little bit angry. There's something to be said for shaping your situations into something that can help you grow.

I had a conversation with someone the other night...and it about made me crazy. This person tries so hard to argue with me for studying about the things that I"m interested in, or pursuing the random stuff that I do. They live their life based in paranoia about what might happen or what could happen or what they think is bound to happen instead of actually going through and finding out what the reality is.

More specifically-because of their own fear of the unknown (which is a lot in their world) anything and everything I suggest absolutely just has to be wrong or bad or misguided.

The book Lila talks about this. People who suffer from a non dynamic, low Quality life fight like hell against those people who are aiming for Dynamic Quality. Robert Pirsig explains all of this in pretty good detail and he has a lot of points but the things that stick out to me are that the life we live and the environment that we live in is fluid. It's always changing. This sounds like a pretty obvious statement but when you really think about it, it's pretty mind blowing. The idea that because everything is always in motion, and assuming as he does that, that motion is trying to move towards a higher state of Quality or Value, gives a whole new perspective to some things.

Your day to day life becomes about the fluidity of the moment and the idea of progressing towards something. Instead of moving away from the past, which people always tend to glorify, you are moving towards the future. Instead of moving away from what you used to believe or feel or know and suffering a loss for it, you are moving towards a new understanding of things, a new value structure, etc.

The idea, of course, is that in moving forward you really are moving towards something that has a higher level of Quality or Value (you'll have to either read the book, google it or wait for me to try and explain it all later if you're curious what he means by this) and not the other way around but one of the main tenets of the book that I got is that forward motion is positive motion. It's when you begin to stagnate or regress that you start having problems.

One of the major flaws that I find in the book is that he makes some pretty grandiose blanket statements, but that's also one of the "charms" I guess. There are a lot of things that I don't really agree with or, more specifically, that have changed a lot since the book was written but overall it's a great book to start generating ideas.

All of this was sort of vaguely floating around in the void while I was trying to meditate. Tonight was not one of the more stellar moments-I feel like a car that has been sitting in the driveway too long. It'll start but you have to really convince it.

My mind was all over the place for one thing (sort of like this post) and I kept having to bring it back to just breathing to get back in the moment. And sometimes, that was a struggle. I sort of had to laugh at myself at one point. I was supposed to be counting my breaths and before I realized it I had forgotten where I was at and was thinking about the fact that I need to change my air filter and how much it's going to stink because it's raining and cold out right now and tomorrow isn't promising to be much better.

'cause that's related to meditation. Ahem.

Anyway-I'm not trying to say that I've got some lofty, super clever goals and methods and that I'm working my way towards self betterment. I'm don't-I feel like I"m making a decent effort but I have eons and eons of work ahead of me before I really have any right to start telling other people what they should or should not be doing.

I just don't always know how to handle it when someone is so aggressively 'Anti Learning'- about different things or places or trying random stuff that has no real relevance to the greater schemes in life but that are fun or novel or whatever.

I dunno-I should probably be more concerned with getting some actual sleep tonight. I'm going to have to get up early for once tomorrow and, well, sleep is sort of helpful for that. :D

Lots of random stuff on my mind.