Coffee and Music and Relaxing

Drinking really great local coffee right now.  Listening to some great indie pop songs on my ipod.  Enjoying relaxing and letting life just be as it is.

I was reading a really great Alan Watts essay last night.  I was also doing a lot of writing in my journal after I had also read some R.D. Laing.  I went to the used bookstore yesterday evening with my husband and I found two paperbacks from the 1960s by R.D. Laing.  It was really cool, because his books are hard to find these days.  He is a rogue psychiatrist who developed his own theories about everything.  One of his main ideas, as I understand it, is that people lose their minds for actual reasons, like feeling like outcasts and having no outlets for being themselves.

I read some pretty creative and out of the mainstream ideas a lot of times.  I think it keeps my mind going and allows me to look at things in different ways.

I still believe in doing things a proper and scientific way.  But Laing’s writing did inspire me to keep going in psychology so that I can become a therapist and help people.  My goal is to be the therapist who can really help people and who will never be patronizing to others.  I think people should always have respect for each other, even if one person is out of it and having a really difficult time.  Everyone’s life experience is different and no one’s experience is more legitimate than anyone else’s.

I also realized that I am currently living in my own idea of heaven on earth these days.  I have everything I could possibly need and the good company of my brave husband.  I surround myself with good literature and good music.  I have a really nice comfy chair.  I feel really fortunate.

I think people should absolutely be free to pursue whatever weird ideas they want to.  Even if something would never work or make sense for me, maybe it totally works for someone else’s life.  My only restraint on this is that one person’s life path can never harm another person.  Other than that, people should be weird and strange and barely understandable to others.  Maybe we should be even more bizarre individuals and really feel free to be ourselves.  I am my own strange version of myself, it’s just a question of allowing myself to be comfortable with that.

Anne Lamott has a great perspective on life.  She allows everything to be messy and imperfect and just admits to all of the anxieties that people struggle with every day.  I have been enjoying reading “Bird by Bird” recently.

I was saying to my husband yesterday that maybe it is good to have some stuff to struggle with in life.  Maybe untying the knots of our own lives is what finally frees them up and allows us to eventually find happiness.  Anyway, I have many knots to untangle in my life.  Like I need to stop being rude to my husband for no good reason and stop being so mindlessly irritable.  I am very optimistic though.

I have tons of respect for Alan Watts.  His writing is really amazing to me and is really delightful to read.  I think he had a great perspective on life that I feel lucky to have access to through his writing.

I’m also slowly coming to terms with my own death these days.  (Which I suppose is pretty Buddhist of me perhaps.)  I think I am starting to see the way Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, like evaporating clouds that are still a part of live overall but will never again take that particular form.  Reading the Alan Watts helped with this because Watts describes alternative perspectives on life very elegantly.

These are my bouncing (as in random) thoughts of the day.  Coffee and music and comfy chairs and a laptop and lots of books and beautiful days and many musings.  My idea of heaven.