Forces exert on us. They move us, hold us, rotate us, direct us, distract us. They are an essential aspect of our existences.
A gust of wind reaches our body, and we feel its direction move us one way. Our inner desire for stability may react to the airy shove by tightening our core muscles and finding balance with our feet. The Earth pulls us inward, its mass a giant cradle for us all. The surface of concrete or earth we stand on supports our weight, and forces our body to remain above it.
We wake up in the morning, and forces begin to wake. The thirst to know stretches our mind: "Where am I? What time is it? What do I want to do today?". Our muscles pull our diaphragm and the gases around us fill our lungs, molecularly shoved by their own pressurized particles above and around us. Our body's waking routine triggered by the oxygen influx, a vast network of actions and reactions take place, calling out beings and sub-beings to action.
"Today is Tuesday", mind re-calls. "To be at work at 9am", and our schedule pulls us. What is to be done before then? Toothbrushing, water drink, morning relaxation. Clothes, backpack, commute. Each of these a long-crafted art with exact shape and quality within us, exerting their force on our minds, and subsequently on our bodies. And so our conscious machinery follows a sequence of actions, a vast network of wants, shoulds, and perhapses that direct our attention and our actions from moment to moment to moment, each moment that is right now.
Our level of awareness about the forces that affect us can vary. Unrecognized kinds of forces are often brought to forefront consciousness, as we yet lack a cooked pattern recipe to react to it. To dance with it. Our subconscious looks at it and thinks "what is this pattern? Have you seen it before?". "I dunno", says subconscious, and escalates it to our awareness. And then we realize there is a llama playing in the park.
"Routine" is what we call rehearsed and repeated patterns of behaviors. Our wake-up routine. Our urinating routine. Our eating routine. Our defecating routine. Our shower routine. Our walking routine. Our driving routine. Our greeting routine. Each of these triggered by a certain state or force (wakefulness, full bladder, hunger and/or presence of food, feces ready to excrete, etc), pulling us to deal with this state in a healthy, pleasant manner. And when we find the same pattern of actions is able to tackle these states effectively, we may learn to "automate" these actions, package them into neat followable subroutines, and kindly ask our subconscious to take care of them. And then we find that when we take these actions, our bodies perform all the actions necessary to deal with these forces by themselves, almost magically. And our thoughts and emotions need not accompany our bodies as they act, and tend to roam their own spaces, reliving memories, projecting future events, molding the details of some project, and feeling the emotions we associate with these, like nostalgia, excitement, anxiety, or pride.
I find it worthy to practice awareness of what we do at each moment. Automated subroutines are useful functions that our bodies offer us. It can happen, though, that we move the actions out of our awareness, and then we forget that we have done this. And if we forget about these automated actions we have trained ourselves to do, we may lose our domain upon these behaviors, and they may remain in ourselves; active but old, dusty, sometimes hidden, and we may find ourselves unable to adapt them or remove them.
Automated behaviors are what they are made, and only aware intention can change them. If we accumulate enough of these automated behaviors, these may begin to spread, and encompass more states and more of our time, even that at times we may feel like slaves to our own actions. We may wake and immediately be pulled by the wake-up routine, performed in a haste to fulfill our schedule. We scrub our face in a rush, we prepare a quick breakfast, put it in our mouths, chew it, and swallow it, all the while thinking and feeling about something else. Our commute routine begins as soon as our wake-up routine ends, even before, the second racer eager to carry the baton in the relay race of the day.
As with the wake-up routine, hurry can be a prevalent factor during our commute. A common mental topic we have is "How can I get to where I'm going the fastest? With least traffic? With least effort?". Thinking about these topics may shorten our time of travel, though they certainly detach our awareness from the majority of our travel and surroundings. Through our lives, our bodies have learned a great deal about how to walk, run, drive, bike, balance without aware intervention. Yet I find that by depending completely on these automated processes, we have forgotten the pleasure of a step. The touch of air on our skin. The games one can play as one moves through the city. Shall I step down these stairs one by one? Two by two? Shall I jump down the entire staircase? Oh, a hole with water. Shall I ignore it? Jump across it? Step around it with one foot on either side? Oh, a low fence. Shall I jump it? Step over it? Politely acknowledge it and sway around it? Can I walk backwards a little bit? Can I close my eyes for a few steps? How does the feel? Oh, look at those myriad naked branches from that towering sycamore. Oh, they're swaying. Feeeel them sway. Birds scurry across the air above me. Many congregate on that bush over there, and tweet their morning tweets. The world is moving - from magma to rivers to worms to humans to clouds. Can you feel a part of it?
It always changes. And we get to experience this.
As before, our commute routine can just as easily hand the baton over to the work routine, which tends to last a whole day. And the forces that push us and pull us, though invisible, are very much present. The force to keep one's employment, a source of monetary value. A force to fulfill our given role, the forces to interact with people around us. To collaborate with some, to spend more time with some, to avoid some. If our emotions and thoughts are not present with our actions, they tend to focus on wishful events or topics from outside the workplace, which can erode the energy from our body's actions, reduce their effectiveness, and cause unpleasant tensions within us.
I find it also worthy to keep aware of these distractions as they come. At the moment of distraction, the force of our intention is derailed by another force, to which we react with this distraction. This means our intention at the time is weaker than our reaction. If we are unaware about this happening, we are unaware about what affects us, and causes us to act in unintended ways. Our beings have accumulated many triggers and reactions throughout our lifetime. Desires, disgusts, shames, pleasures, resentments, attractions, pains - they all flow in us and clash and meld like multicolored fluid play-dough, awarding us the unique shapes and composition that our personality is.
Practice can help strengthen intention, and recover energy from our distractions.
Examples of distractions I observe in myself are:
- Attention towards people of interest around me. In particular, women attract my eye's and body's attention.
- Physical pain triggers a reaction in my body to stop the pain.
- At times my body eats something that it likes, and begins an eating reaction, in which it attempts to eat as many snacky things as it can. It does not find a fulfilled state, but rather it stops only when the discomfort of fullness in the stomach balances out the need for distraction. I notice my emotions are muted when I have eaten much food - perhaps this distraction is triggered by a desire to avoid certain emotions.
- The distractions of hurry, rush, efficiency - deferring my attention to one or two linear metrics, behind which the rest of the world's richness is veiled.
In the primal level, I recognize two basic forces within us: those intended and those reacted. Those reacted are forces we do not wish to exert, but rather have learned to exert, feel we must exert, or are unaware of exerting. They may seem as our own, but upon scrutiny, they are revealed to be artifices of the layers and layers we have adopted through time and still wear. I feel these as pulls upon us from the world.
Those that come from intention come from a place closer to us. A pure desire within us yearns to express a truth, yet untouched by the world, by projecting it onto existence. It comes from a well deep within us, and speaks in our silence, when we feel past our reactions. "What am I? What do I want?" And sometimes a voice answers, and we can choose to direct our intention towards it. I feel this as the push that we, our true beings, exert upon the world. By aligning ourselves with this intention, we can live Truth.
