anxiety

Good morning!

I had a strangely anxious night’s sleep last night, without identifiable cause. Nothing like what I used to experience, but I am still a conditioned being.

I took my second child cycling 2 days ago and realised how much life I had missed over the years. How my mind had always been elsewhere. The petting zoo, with him wanting the goats to breathe on his hand, and how joyous he looked when they did. We used to go to one near our house and I could never engage and enjoy those days properly; I was in my ‘retire in 3 years mid-covid’ phase. What a miserable existence.

How many wasted years which will never return. How many half-remembered experiences where I was thinking about the next attainment - the next hurdle at work or training session or race; all this useless stuff which just pulled me out of the moment and into my head.

This kind of remorse for the life not lived is common from what I have read, and I guess this might be part of the depression which often settles in 2 months after breaking free of the self. My life is better in every way and I know this will pass, but the brain still has the old habits and maybe these feelings also need to come to the surface and go through a defrag process.

These last 2 months have had less quantity of experience with my kids and yet infinitely more. 30 minutes of watching them in the park now is worth more than 30 days previously. I am present. 

I do find it a little unfair still. The fact that most people are born with regulated dopamine and do not need to work like this. My wife and many others, who seem effortlessly engaged in the moment. Their lives are not perfect but they have brains which defrag of their own accord.

That said I looked more into adhd and dopamine, and it seems that tonic dopamine is something like 10-20% lower in people like me. Zone 2 exercise can increase this by 15-30%, which will be why I was so successful at work. With constant and applied effort we can achieve a similar baseline to a sedentary ‘normal brain’.

Let’s try to make that a little more positive: my D1 receptors, which are the ‘go’ receptors associated with reward or learning, are comparatively stronger; this is why I have a sharp chisel. While that means I ended up trapped in an over-learned version of the self, it also means that… what? I can crave more? I am more motivated. I suppose that motivation has now moved toward removing motivation. D2 receptors are the un-learners, and that’s what I need though.

I have booked a ferry trip in a week and will do the first of my formal ‘meditation bike tours’. Just me, my homemade titanium bike, and a tent. I don’t know how long I will be gone; probably just over a week. I have always loved these tours but this one will be with the intentional focus of removing some of the conditioning of my life.

The violence and the solitary striving and the nature of my work have programmed me to always look for threat and I am tired of it. The concept of self has changed drastically, with a new awareness of impermanence; they threat is also gone. I can let go of it.

I no longer worry being away from my kids, but I enjoy being with them more, if that makes sense. I imagine my wife and other child will move into this house with me soon, and I will stop waking up next to my eldest as he begins to share a room with his brother again. This is natural and this is change and this is life and I am able to experience and enjoy the moment for the first time, but it is a bittersweet kind of thing. The moment is always here but always ending.

I guess this is why people encounter nibbana again and again. You lose your sense of a permanent self in the initial encounter, but you are still attached and still suffer. You love your children and your wife and your life, and this brings joy but also sadness at the fact that it is a flowing river and you cannot hold the water. It brings a complete reassessment of who and what you are and how you want to live and love for the rest of your days.

I do not want to build a company. I had so much data to export from the experience and it seemed so important to get it out to the world… but if you ask me what is important now, it’s just to live the life I have as fully and wholly as possible. Without struggle and without strain and without clinging.

To see the boys grow and to help them manage their emotions better than I did. To hold them when they need holding and cheer them when they need cheering.

‘Empty empty happy happy.’ Such simple teachings. I am not empty, but I was for a while. It was too much, if I’m honest. Too much to hold onto. How do you hold on to emptiness? And the sense of wellbeing and concern for the world extended too far beyond my own immediate circle.

Maybe I don’t need to be empty just yet. Maybe I just need to be ‘emptier’ and to allow the joy of the life I have to suffuse the container of james.

I wonder what this anxiety is. It’s faded already. It is likely just some neurochemical echo of the wellbeing of the last two months; a kind of elastic rebound into the old ways. The brain trying to use its anxiety circuits and finding nothing to latch to.

It’s free-floating now. The anxiety before would always be ‘no enough’ or ‘not finished’ and now it’s more of an echo, with nothing to latch to.

It’s just the reality of this moment, and this moment too shall pass. All the good and all the bad and everything in-between.

This is just the neural network settling into a new configuration, and I am guiding the process. I imagine it will be gone in under an hour, but let’s see. The key is to just observe it and let it be. Dominoes in a chain.

I love my family so much and I am so happy I am able to feel it properly now, like a butterfly who has had its wings unbound. But I am also unguarded where previously I was in a hardened cocoon. Everything is so much more real. 

Anyway time to sit.

/jb202509160613