I'm going to use this space to talk a little bit about an issue I've been trying to overcome. In the current successful millennium that we live in, people often speak a lot about the important need to stay focus and goal oriented. Especially for a guy like myself who is considered to be at an age where your ambitious hard work should be paired diligently with great focus to achieving your real world goals. You are supposed to wake up hungry every morning with the drive and mentality of success. Entrepreneurial magazines say it, self-development articles say it, motivational public figures say it.
I know I read these self-improvement things all the time, but when I introspect on the way I think and function in life, I'm actually no where close to achieving that kind of successful energy. In fact, as an adult in my late twenties, I still find myself struggling a lot like a kid in my basic ability to concentrate and stay focus in life. It is like unconscious living or sleep walking your way through being alive.
Whether it's in the form of daydreaming, excessive over-thinking, or even dragging the past into the future and vice versa in the middle of my present, my overwhelming mind has a tendency to astral project itself to hundreds of thoughts and matters all the time. The analogy equivalent would be that it resembles an Internet browser that is constantly trying to load and process hundreds of tabs all at the same time which is fatal to 'staying on path' and can feel very disempowering.
These behaviours, although happen a lot in my everyday repertoires, often has a tendency to reach its peak of conquest whenever I am required to 'sit down' or pool my energy to complete a task. During those moments, my concentration just wouldn't be able to find its center and starts going places. And because of this, I feel so disconnected to life and it worries me. The worry then leads to unnecessary guilt and anxiousness because I can't seem to conjure up the mental discipline to correct my bad patterns.
From time to time when I try to swap agendas up at hand in order to keep the mind interested and hooked, my thoughts then now worry about the previous task. Kinda like when you're on the computer, you think of your bed, but when you go to bed, you think of all the tasks on the computer you could have done if you had just concentrated and be disciplined.
And on top of everything, my mental indiscipline occasionally gets so bad that all I end up thinking about or could ever think about is, yes you guessed it, sex. I don't even know if other guys could relate to this, but yes I think about sex all the time. And I really mean all the time. It is like my sex thoughts now share the same urgency as breathing. It pops into my head at every chance it gets and lingers for as long as my libido isn't sated.
Sometimes, things get so extreme that I have to halt whatever it is I'm doing on emergency hold in order to go jerk myself off a few rounds before coming back to my tasks. And even so, new sex thoughts tend to arise, and I will have to re-administer a second or a third or a fourth jerk to wash it out of my system.
All that lack of collectivity, coupled with sex daydreaming makes me a very idle and highly unproductive person. In the end, days and months and years go by and all I end up being if I were to be truly honest, is an unconscious person that gets swept away by the current of his thoughts while 'existing' in life. Like an individual without his anchor.
As I write this down, I'm starting to wonder if my lack of mental control and discipline could actually have its roots embedded deep within my longtime struggle as a human being to get myself to stay centered in life. In other words, the mindful practice of being engaged with reality or the present. Could this stubborn mind of mine who refuses to be grounded breed an unmindful person who is now often never fully present or engaged with the pending reality that is in front of him?
Recently, I got to thinking a lot about the concept of unconsciousness, consciousness awakening. Consciousness of the mind I feel in this context, is the ability to stay centered, on path and fully awake in the current reality in front and not be carried away by your thoughts and sensual desires. Knowing full well what you need to do and what is needed to be done in order to keep moving forward towards achieving goals and attaining progress.
Mental unconsciousness could range from not noticing what happened between your drive home from the supermarket, to not knowing how you got from 22 to 27 within a span of five years. What I'm currently experiencing, the struggle for concentration and presence in reality, is a form of unconsciousness. Whereby I allow myself to be easily pulled by thoughts and drown in the my own tsunami of naval-gazing that sabotages my progress rather than take control. I haven't exactly figured out the details of what the plan is and how I am going to overcome this, but writing it down is definitely the first step towards therapeutic healing, followed by the next conscious course of action.
