On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for July 26th
Enjoy Every Moment
You only live once. Just take a deep breath and enjoy every moment. The amount of stress you put on yourself, staying busy and being overly focused on the future or distracting yourself from the present, makes it impossible to sit down and honestly enjoy each moment as it comes. You don’t need external things to make yourself happy; you need to be satisfied.
Unfortunately, you will never truly enjoy every moment. You are a privileged son of a bitch if you can enjoy even 50% of your moments. Life is life, and if you live a life, you will not want every moment to be perfect. Society makes it seem possible to be happy all the time, and that is, to say the least, disingenuous. We are fortunate to experience happiness even a few times in our lives.
In fact, some moments are going to fucking destroy you. Some moments will make you think about not having any more moments. Some moments will be hijacked by assholes trying to steal moments from other people. At times, you will be in so much pain that you will not want to be in that moment at all.
A lot of your shitty moments are going to be your fault. Yes, you can read mindfulness blogs, inspirational books, and attend meditation classes, but you will still feel obligated to enjoy a moment, and the rest of the world will take that from you. Your expectations will be too high. You are being punished for wanting too much time before. You have to work, and you have responsibilities that aren’t enjoyable.
You will get sick. You can’t enjoy those moments. You might even get a disease, and you might end up having your moments cease from that disease. You will be hard-pressed to find many enjoyable moments there. You might have to watch someone you love lose their moments to a painful disease, and that will suck the enjoyment right out of a moment.
To have many enjoyable moments, you will need this list of things:
- Perfect health and good looks
- Time*
- Money*
- Privilege
- If you have a job, a job that doesn’t require all your time or energy
- Discipline
- Intelligence
- Love and support
- No obstacles between you and what you want to do
Without all those things listed above, you will not enjoy 50% of your moments. Here is why:
- You will be sick and get a disease, and you aren’t good-looking enough to attract people to want to help you with anything.
- It’s never your time. It’s your kids’ time, your spouse’s time, your job’s time, your needy friends’ time, the court’s time, prison time…
- You will always have to make more money. The way “normal” American life requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit debt.
- You may need to work harder to catch up with those who have a head start.
- If you have a job, then not only do you have to go to the job, but you have to get enough sleep, eat for the energy to do the job, get to the job with some transportation, and think about work when you’re not even there, even if you aren’t trying to. This takes up 20.7 hours of your day.
- Unless you have privilege, you’ll be using your downtime to binge-watch TV, go down Internet rabbit holes, or drink yourself stupid, so any time left over to do something you could enjoy has been stolen by your lack of personal willpower.
- If you’re not extremely smart, you have to walk around confused. Just seeing a new coffee menu can be daunting for most people. You can’t truly enjoy your moments if you don’t understand what’s happening.
- Many people have to face the world alone. They lack love and support. Most people are fake ass people, so they don’t love and support anyone, so they find themselves not loving or helping anyone. This can make moments unbearable.
- Money, time, health, and discipline are all things that allow people to do whatever they want and therefore enjoy the shit out of life. How many times, because you have to be realistic, do you have to say no to helo-skiing in the Andes?
Those yoga mindfulness blogs that populate the Internet are for rich, privileged people. If you are poor and dealing with social alienation or health issues, then you will have a really hard time finding a moment to enjoy.
Good luck.
*Pink Floyd songs