I live [comparatively to most people] a fairly solitary life. I live by myself in a cottage near Golden Gate Park in SF. I am a video editor and usually work mostly alone – until it’s time for the client to make changes in ‘real-time’. Even when not working at my cottage, I am usually editing alone in the room at the company I am working for that week [sometimes broadcast tv, sometimes corporate clients, etc].
This past week I was working for a corporate client who sat in my edit suite with me for 3 days straight. The client was constantly on her mobile phone talking [engaged in a conference call or merely talking to her superiors one on one], or on her laptop answering the many emails that chimed in constantly, or on a landline shouting at her assistant. After 3 solid days of this going on for 8 hours a day while I tried to do my work, my mental state started to collapse.
By the last day of the edit my ‘self’ was projecting stories forward and backward and was collapsing space around possibilities. I ended up saying ‘no’ constantly, even before a question was asked I was already ‘married’ to the story that the change could not be executed. pg 149 LOK – “the self wants to become a certain way or attain a certain state. It wants to be happy, to be in possession of something, to be finished, or simply to endure.”
Though I found myself completely unable to shift my mood or alter the stories that my ‘self’ was spinning and marrying, I did NOTICE the activity I was engaged in [and the story I was engaged to] while it was going on. I took solace in the in-the-moment immediate noticing of that activity. Can actual action of working my way out of that state be far behind?
-Diana
Hi Diana,
I didn’t want to leave your question about a small world hanging, but this TSK forum is probably not the right place to elaborate. My e-mail is mgray@nmia.com, if you would like me to look back ten years in time. –Michael
Michael, did I really look at a screen adaption of a novel of yours? When was this? Have we met before? If so – it really is a small world, huh?
Hi Diana,
It seems a good place to start the next nine weeks to comment on your final post of the previous unit. I don’t think I have been subjected to the degree of agitated noise you describe having to endure for eight hours, and I wouldn’t rate my chances of being as aware as you seem to have been under that onslaught. What you say about noticing is interesting. I think I found something similar in my initial attempt to work with the practice after the reading for this week: noticing the object of desire places me elsewhere than helplessly in thrawl to it’s influence. Interestingly, in the case of desire, it places me in the future–and this opens up a greater breadth in how I inhabit time. — Michael (PS–you once looked at a screen adaption I did of a novel, but I had no experience in how to do one, so it didn’t lead anywhere).