With apologies to u/utthana, whose title I’ve stolen. I thought about replying to your post but that felt like hijacking, and a bit redundant three months down the track. In retrospect this may be more hijacky.

The world is quicksand but, contrary to all that I was led to believe about quicksand by cartoons, I think that struggling might actually be the way out.

I have also spent the last few months distracted and swamped by life and the world, to the exclusion of contemplation. For a long time my daily practice was at nil. Awareness was always there in the background in the form of dissatisfaction, but it just didn’t seem like I had the mental space or energy to do anything with it other than acknowledge it. Even my dreams have become a dull penance.

If I had to describe existence recently I’d call it sawdust.

I’ve done a bit of re-prioritisation in the last week to be able to immerse myself, for a while at least, in practice, and attempt to figure out what the hey has been going on this year. I need to get some safeguards in place so I don’t end up so mentally swamped again. It’s a catch-22. Living in reasonable comfort in this world requires attention to a lot of stuff I’d like to ignore (money, money… money). It’d be nice to just make it go away but apparently I’m not skilled enough to do that yet.

So that’s the challenge. Find a way to exist that isn’t untenable but which also allows space - the bulk of the space - for mental progress. Perhaps in some manner I’m cultivating strife because I have some ass-backwards commitment to the idea that this is the only thing that will drive me. Intellectually, I know that pain isn’t the best motivator but it seems to be a condition of my progress that it only happens when I’m so severely dissatisfied with the status quo that I force through changes in reality, temper-tantrum style. But too much strife just = stagnation and despair. Hopefully this truth will sink into and take root in my mind sometime soon.

So some techniques I’m currently employing:

Less wishy-washiness: If you want to do magic, do magic. Don’t beat around the bush, generate some intentions, set parameters, make things happen, judge your results! I think that fear of failure can be so constraining that this one area of your life where you should be wildly imaginative, flamboyant and fearless can become a sinkhole of restrictions, excuses and apologies. The challenge here is walking the tightrope of not sinking into despair or giving up when you fail. There’s a valuable, fleeting moment between action and failure when your mind tells you just why you failed. The problem is that there’s a huge amount of data to unpack in that millisecond/frisson of disquiet.

Floating brain: I’m almost embarrassed to include this one, but I’ve found that it’s effective at tackling the sensation that you’re located in a brain, experiencing the world from behind a set of eyeballs, especially when you don’t have much mental energy for genuine deconstruction of the world. Take your brain, make it transparent, float it in front of you. This helps me to remember that the brain is a construct of the mind, like the world, not the centre/originating point of my consciousness. It also gives me a sense of omnipresence.

Judicious use of fiction: Computer games, books; becoming invested in them and increasing their “realness,” particularly that of the characters, doesn’t so much decrease the reality of my day to day existence as widen its possibilities. That’s clumsily expressed - I can try to elaborate if anyone’s interested.

So anyway. Long story short, do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light, etc.