The plenum of doom

Have you ever found yourself getting caught up in a sense of doom and gloom? Not because anything particular is happening to you, but just a general sense that the world is not a good place? You know where you are so pre-occupied, funnily enough not with anything in particular, just in a general sense not quite engaged with what is in front of you.

I did think I was immune from sustained bouts of this sense of all is not good, but I have discovered this past week that I am not. You possibly think you are immune? Maybe…

What keeps you sane? For me, my yoga practice that I have more or less stuck to for close to ten years now I can hand on heart say keeps me sane in the face of the turbulence of our daily lives. I have though had to take a break from my usual physical regimen due to shin splints. My lovely wife Aira also keeps me sane, but she has been away this past week. This has been of those weeks of turbulence on the job front, ie finding out that my day job in IT is not going to be there at the end of this month and going through the ups and downs of trying to get interviews and the rest of the rigmarole of job hunting.

I did plan to deepen my meditation practice, to build up my repertoire of some not too challenging asana and to finishing reading the couple of books that I have been carrying around with me for a while. And then there are the friends who I have not caught up with for some time. None of that happened. I got distracted. You presumably are familiar with grand plans coming to nothing due to distraction 🙂

In my case, the distraction started with the Metro on the tube. I got into reading it instead of engaging in the quiet contemplation or other reading that I usually get into on those tube/rail journeys. I started following news events and current affairs. I started following them online and clicked through to all the analysis and commentary. I felt my attention span which has never been great shorten drastically. My sense of equanimity of being able to not get caught up in the turbulence around me vanished.

My sense of perspective is somehow no longer there. I avidly follow BBC News, BBC World Service with bouts of CNN, Al-Jazeera even VICE News and Fox News. I have become a news junkie. This is a drug, I can’t stop. I have my own opinions, but they are somewhat not my own. They are a kind of mash-up of various pundits’ views. I know what is going in the world, but only in a as-reported-by-the-media kind of way. I align perfectly with ‘mainstream’ thinking. I even start to see sense in some of what happens in the workplace and the corporate world, that conditioned machine-like factory-floor-supervisor behaviour around me that I used to see through, but I don’t anymore.

I have trouble engaging in any sort of quiet contemplation. I can’t wait to get to the next thing, the next news item, the next event, my shallow reaction to it in line with everyone else’s reaction. That and checking Facebook. And underneath it all this sense of gloom. I need a fix, and a news snippet is my fix, I go from one fix to the next.

My IQ has diminished and I am indeed now an addict. I am in a prison of my own making. I am in the plenum of doom and I put myself here 😦

In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince)

“No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.”

There is hope though. I am on the way to the airport to meet Aira. Later my son and mother are coming around. And I have my Sunday class to teach tomorrow plus the after-class-coffee-club. Someone in these pending interactions, probably Aira, is going to slap some sense into me.

I look forward to escaping 🙂

How about you, what is your escape plan?

_/|\_