How to Create Space When You’re Always in a Rush
Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead

Not getting enough items on your To-Do list checked off? Do you feel guilty because you’re not doing enough?

I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t always remain calm, zen and un-phased when I don’t get everything done. Sometimes I get distracted; sometimes unforeseen events happen which get in the way of my ambitions.

Sometimes I have a hard time not caring about unimportant things. I want the dishes to be clean and the house spotless, all my errands to be finished and everything neat and tidy. The problem is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, things don’t usually work like this. In fact, they almost never work like this.

There’s always something to be done, always that “thing” in the back of your head that you forgot about that needs to be taken care of. There’s always something else that needs to be finished, and then you can feel happy. (Or so you think.) But then you remember another task, and the cycle repeats.

Of course, there’s only one problem… Nothing is ever complete. Not for long, at least.

So if that time and place is impossible to reach, we have to stop caring about unimportant things.

The constant desire to want to be done, then be happy, creates the background feeling of anxiety. If you’ve ever found yourself doing the dishes as fast as possible, when you have no reason to be in a hurry (like I have), you know what I mean.

If we’re ever to get at that feeling of peace — being OK with taking things slowly — we need to start enjoying our lives. We need to start being instead of just doing.

Here are a few of my (humble) suggestions on how to create more space in your life:

* Realize that not having everything done is a good thing. “Blasphemy!” you say. I know, I know. This sounds awfully backwards, but it’s true. Having things in your inbox means that your time is in demand. And that’s a good thing.

• You don’t need a two week vacation to create space. When you pull up in your driveway after work, take a minute or two to just relax and breathe. Turn off the radio, and just sit in silence for a moment. Enjoy the space. Two minutes is all you need. Now don’t tell me you don’t have time.

• Look for the gaps. Between your thoughts, there lives little gaps. They may not be huge, but they’re there. Start paying attention to those gaps. Allow them to grow by just letting go of thinking all the time. You might think that you need to think about things in order to work or to live. But the opposite is usually true. Most of the time, thinking is completely unnecessary. Most of the time, you’re just thinking about the same things over and over. That’s called a pattern. Or brooding, whatever label you prefer.

• Listen, feel, engage… be there. The reason we’re usually in such a hurry is due to a mind-created obsession with finishing things. So the way out of that is to be where you are. Listen to the ambient sounds you hear, feel your feet on the ground when you walk, feel your hands running through the water while you wash the dishes.

• Let go of the need to become. Sure, there will always be things you want to change about your life. There will always be goals, dreams, desires and all manner of wonderful experiences to seek out. Great, seek them. Desire them. But don’t sacrifice the present. Don’t sacrifice the place you’re in right now. There’s too much beauty.

With that, I’d like to leave you with an excerpt from one of my favorite lectures by Alan Watts:

“Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you’ve missed seeing. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the world has ’seen the light.’ That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you’re seeing it. Like you see aureoles around Buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante’s ‘Paradiso.’

Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s beyond light, it’s so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great Mandela appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet, there’s black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the Yang comes from the Yin, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can’t hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears.

But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you’ve been watching a kind of thing radiating out. ‘But,’ it says, ‘you know, this isn’t all I can do,’ and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves, and they say, well, you’ve been looking at this as I’ve been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let’s add a third dimension; it’s going to come right at you now.

And meanwhile, it says, we’re not going to just do like this, we’re going to do little curlicues. And it says, ‘well, that’s just the beginning!’ Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little sub figures are contained in what you originally thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing complexities if sound all over the place, and this thing’s going, going, going, and you think you’re going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns into… Why, us, sitting around here.”

See, when we’re always in a hurry, always looking to achieve a goal, we miss out on the miracle that’s around us. Right here. Right now.

Let’s start this thing off nice. Firstly, a belated Happy New Year to everyone. Personally, I had a freaking fantastic NYE, and I hope y’all did too. 2008 was a great year for me, and building on that, personally, 2009 was filling me with optimism. So many great projects in the works, so much hope for the Future.

And then I turn on the News. Reality is a harsh mistress my friends.

And now I’m going to tell you all the ways in which we are totally fucked.

Firstly, we’ve got the news from NY, which George Rohac was kind enough to alert me to.

The New York Police Department wants to be able to shut down cell phones, in case of a terrorist attack.

Because, you know Mumbai. The whole attack was apparently coordinated over mobile phones by handlers who were monitoring the Media.

Which you kind of need, given the attackers were allegedly dosed to the eyeballs on LSD and Cocaine. Making the thing sound more and more like a 24 script-writer’s wet dream.

So the NY police want to prevent a similar coordinated attack. Does this make sense? Yes and No.

No, because Terrorists analyse and exploit weak points to create maximum carange. The best way to do this is by making every attack original. That’s why post-9/11’s hellish flight security measures only punishes the masses. And those guys sure didn’t need mobile phones, did they.

Yes, because Obama. Here’s my first prediction for the year: Copycat Terrorism is coming kids.

You can bet there’s armed and angry right-wing militias in the States studying every single bit of data they can on the Mumbai attacks. And thinking they can do it one better. Have we forgotten who the first people to try to blow up the World Trade Center were. And when that was. The Clinton era. Those “evil Democrats” who want to take peoples guns away.

Al Qaeda et al have hardened troops from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia. The US has a bunch of pissed-off Vets returning from Afganistan and Iraq. How many people remember the post-WWII crime waves? We have a lot of trained killers out there again.

But let’s keep moving. Let me tell you why blocking cellphones and filtering the Internet is the beginning of the end of this phase of civilization.

Corporate Democracy hates you. Every single Democracy is deeply in bed with and funded by the Corporations.

The US passes the DMCA laws because Disney wants to sell more Mickey Mouse dolls. Then through “Free Trade” it spreads around the world. France wants to filter the Internet so that Carla Bruni can sell more CDs. Britain apes France, and Australia apes Britain. But of course they do it in the name of the children and the family. Please.

It’s about CONTROL. The State exists to command and control.

We are supposed to Trust in Authority. But the illusion of Control is being eaten away.

Exhibit A:

The Police, the fists of the State, caught red-handed executing one of it’s citizens.

Has this happened before? No doubt. What’s the big difference then? Not only was it witnessed by the train full of passengers, it was recorded by a great deal of them.This clip is just the best of many you can find on YouTube.

This is evolutionary. If those Cops were more than just brutish thugs, if they had half a fucking brain, they’d have gone onto that train and taken every single mobile phone and video camera away.

As Evidence.

So let’s fast-forward a little. Because you can bet that the band of brothers, those boys in blue, are mighty pissed off that one of their own had to resign like that. And they’ll be sure now not to go out that way either. They will confiscate all the phones and video cameras from now on. But some bright soul will have already uploaded photos to Flickr, or even better using Zannel to post it through Twitter. Even better an impromptu citizen-journalist might be streaming the whole affair with Qik or its many clones.

That might work a few times. Until the Police decide they need to be equipped with mobile cellphone jammers, nominally for the fight against Terror. Then second the shit goes down in front of a bunch of witnesses, on goes the jamming.

But Terrorism is bad, right. We want to stop that. It’s all for the Greater Good!

Exhibit B:

Well, let’s wander over to France for a minute. A bunch of kids decide to drop out and live their own Future in a little village.

There’s a tenuous link to them involving some train derailments. Trains were hurt, but there were no deaths. So what happens?

..the French government claims that Tarnac and its small shop are the headquarters of a dangerous cell of anarchist terrorists plotting to overthrow the state. Images of balaclava-clad police swooping to arrest suspects in Tarnac were compared by bewildered villagers to a strange, rural action movie. The government hinted that locals were too gormless to have noticed the terrorist activity in their midst. But after weeks of controversy, supporters are rising up to defend the young people of the village.

Those kids aren’t ETA (the Basque separatists). They’re just saying no to the ‘rat race’ and finding their own niche to live in. Yet they are declared an Enemy of the State that must be crushed.

So let’s go back to the start; to Mumbai. How did the word get out so quickly? Twitter and Flickr. What did the Government eventually try to stop happening? You guessed it. Would this have stopped the handlers coordinating the attacks? Given they were most likely getting their intel from CNN, no. Would an immediate Media blackout have prevented this? NO! Because you can bet your asses they had their own, separate cell watching from afar and reporting in anyway.

I repeat, these are well planned attacks exploiting observed gaps in the defenses of their target(s). 9/11 was accomplished with just box-cutters. The best defense is an armed and knowledgeable citizenry; all this just demonstrates the increasing power of mobile communications technology.

Are you still reading? Did you think I’d forgotten about the Economic Collapse? Don’t worry, I’m getting to it.

This is, as a Prime Minister of Australia once said, “the recession we had to have”. This is the System collapsing. The Governments of the world can’t fix Global Warming; it is, quite frankly, all their fault. They are agents of the Status Quo.

As Dr Horrible sez: “the status is far from quo”.

The next decade will be very interesting. These are the Breaking Times. The Post-Industrial future is coming, whether people like it or not. You can look forward to more decaying strip-malls and empty shops in general. eBay and it’s like will be where everyone shops. As everything slows down, people will be forced to prioritize. Shopping as therapy will become a 20th relic.

The Future as I see it is peer2peer. The answer is never Fear, but Love. So I call for Revolutionary Optimism!

I implore you; skip the Corporations and buy from your fellow man as much as you can. Make your own clothes or buy them on etsy at least. Garden! Barter! Hang out at local markets. Cook for your friends. Skip that crappy Hollywood blockbuster and veg out on the Internet instead. Or with people in Real Life.

Reality is Fiction; society is a social construct. The Future has never been more in our hands. Since our species first stopped hunting and settled down to start Agriculture it’s been all about top-down control systems. But, Internet be praised, we are quite possibly positioned for the first time since then to change this. Technology is what defines us as being human; and we increasingly don’t need the Bureaucracy of the State to manage things for us. Instead, we can engineer and maintain solutions that run fine by themselves.

The State’s days are numbered! Sadly, this most likely means it will become more violent in it’s death throes. The Evolution is not about burning shit down; it’s about obviating all the crap that’s got us in this mess to begin with.

Power to the People!

Thanks for listening; you’ve been a wonderful audience.

tiny pieces of chloroform
dance with impending anxiety as
arctic tides shift through solstice and
again restlessness awakens..

eyes open into this chaos as
my center strives for balance
the monotony of time-elusive
tattoos wrinkles into my weary soul..

am i living for the dream
or dreaming to live..
in this conundrum of minutes and
meetings, how do i find me?

awake into the only true tangibility
grasp this slice of the time/space continuum
living out in front of myself
turns tomorrows into yesterdays..

warm summer winds
wind wisps of wisdom
curling tendrils of truth with
soft scents of today..

*inhale*

:: be ::

*exhale*

she juggles worlds,
not even knowing who she really is
the poetry of washing dishes,
the artistic movement of guiding a wayward child,
in the studio of her room she sings fear to sleep,
with a power unparalleled she cradles an anguished heart –
she just . does . it .
forgetting
the brilliant willow of her back bone
the glimmer of flowers in her eyes.
Then the wind blows sweet
and
she falls to her senses,
still juggling the world.

thank u deb

ive yet to see oscar grant die before my eyes. i dont think i’ll ever see that.

the first reaction when i heard and read the story was fury.

here we go again.

amadu dialo, sean bell, aaron roberts, walter collins, mathew dumas, shawn maxwell, julian alexander, jose ramierez jimenez, deon studimyer… just off the top of the head.

the anger and energy that boils up out of us find its way into chaos and destruction. the violence of the police brings out hatred and fear in the public.

now probably the most tragic part of this story is only beginning to reveal itself.

the officer in question said it was an accident.. to the outrage of the public who witnessed an unarmed man on his face with another officer kneeling on him, getting shot thru his back..

yet from the new angles of video footage that have been released, it seems OBVIOUS that it truly was an accident of some sort. like he didn’t mean to actually pull the trigger. the reaction of the officer himself was of shock and horror.

how could he have drawn his gun — loaded and cocked — and pulled the trigger BY ACCIDENT?

because he was pumped full of a deadly mixture of fear and adrenaline. of the dangerous combination of ego and a superiority complex.. juxtaposed with insecurity.

this officer is a product of our law enforcement SYSTEM.

our country’s law enforcement policy and training. they train these men and women to shoot to kill at any “perceived” threat. then they teach you.. no, they drill into your head that there is nothing BUT threat to your life..

especially from a black man.

there is a deep-seated guilt that runs through the veins of some white men. couple that with an environment ripe with a mutual distrust that has been created over the last 50-60 years and rather than feel guilty, many will take on indignation instead. its easier to deal with the emotion in that way then to face the true depth of our bloody history.

the civil rights movement marks the perceived evolution of our 1950′s friendly neighborhood policeman and morphed him into a twisted, corrupt, egotistical, racist and violent caricature of this so-called public servant. someone to fear. someone to never trust.

the cop in question has to be punished. but what about his superiors, what about the policies and the SYSTEM that trained him to be what he became?

to serve and protect is NOT what police are in the 21st century.

the entire system needs a complete purging and overhaul.

with the technology today of non-lethal weaponry, there is ZERO excuse for a law enforcement official to be brandishing loaded nine millimeters FIRST, especially in a fairly controlled situation where there are other officers on the scene.

its the system that is to blame here, more so than the man who jumped the gun (literally) and took the life of an innocent young man, destroyed a family and destroyed his OWN family and life in the process.

true tragedy.

Winter is upon upon us… If you’re like me, this has been a stressful season. I have been irritable and moody… things that are going wrong seem to be more wrong than usual. The deepness of the season is sinking into my bones.  The weight of the current state of the world, from the war in the middle east, to the tragedy in Gaza, to the economic crisis, to the ways that life has gotten more and more hectic.  There seems to be no time.  We are a nation on Prozac. Over medicated and under nurtured.  And throw winter into the mix……….. and you have the pains of life, magnified.  What I am learning though, is that winter is a very powerful time.  It is a symbol of life and death.  This is the cycle of death and rebirth, of disintegration and renewal that controls all Life on the Earth.. including me and including you. It is the time that although motion ceases… at the same moment, Life begins to stir again. Animals go into hibernation and seeds sleep deep beneath the snow. They will not move until the spring, but deep within them a process has completed itself. There is an infinite contraction of energy that the long nights and cold days reflect. This energy reaches its limit, and the cycle reverses itself. From that moment on, even though the winter will continue to gather strength and unfold as it must… the spring has been born. And with the birth of spring… the seeds of summer are sown, and the harvests of the summer with it.

This is a dark and trying season… It is a season that is repeated in your life again and again. Each tragedy, loss, failure, and humiliation reaches its inmost movement, spends its energy, and from that long journey another begins—a journey towards warmth…and a journey towards light… One season will always follow the other…. they do not exist apart.

These seasons of the year, and seasons of your life, come and go, complete themselves and give way to each other whether you are aware of the dynamics that controls them or not. If you are not, the seasons appear to have lives of their own and you forget they are each part of a cycle—a cycle that you have encountered many times before and will encounter many times again. Your life is built on this cycle of seasons — and on the continual repetition of them. The arrival of winter, and the coming of darkness and death, initiates the coming of light and life. This cycle controls the unfolding of your life and all within it.

When you are aware of this cycle, you can participate in it… You cannot stop the death that comes in the winter… but you can determine in the winter what will be born in the spring. You can contribute your intelligence and wisdom and will… to the intelligence and movement of a dynamic larger than you. You can plant the seed that will sprout in the spring that will lay the foundation for a different winter to come after the summer that has yet to arrive. You can only do this for yourself.

This is the power of the deep winter…. It challenges you, confronts you, and shows you what you can and must change in yourself. It is a holy and precious season… and it illuminates your holy and precious life. It is your potential beckoning to you… disguised as an adversary, a tragedy, or a disaster. Will the adversary, tragedy or disaster shape your experience, or will you shape your experience of it? Will your fears overwhelm you, or will they show you new and different ways to respond to them?

At the solstice the Sun stands still for three days (solstice means standstill) meaning that it rises in the same place for three days running. This period is a sacred window, an opening, a gap in the fabric of the year, during which we can come to terms with our past, connect with our purpose, listen to our guidance, and prepare psychologically for the gradual movement into the new year. These dates mark the shortest days of the year.. and the longest Nights.

It’s always darkest before the dawn, isn’t it?

This year the Solstice was exact in the US on December 21, 2008 at 7:04 AM EST

It as a turning point — the day that marks the return of the sun.

What new life is stirring in you this Deep Winter?

~inspired by The Seat of the Soul

Joni performs Little green from her 1971 album Blue.

The song was influenced by having to put up her daughter for adoption in 1965. Joni was reunited with her daughter in 1997. Read the incredible and moving story of their reunion here

Born with the moon in cancer
Choose her a name she will answer to
Call her green and the winters cannot fade her
Call her green for the children who’ve made her
Little green, be a gypsy dancer

He went to California
Hearing that everything’s warmer there
So you write him a letter and say, her eyes are blue.
He sends you a poem and shes lost to you
Little green, hes a non-conformer

Chorus:

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There will be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the northern lights perform
There will be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there will be sorrow

Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed
Little green, have a happy ending

Chorus:

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There will be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the northern lights perform
There will be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there will be sorrow

layers of tainted reality
struggle under the weight of retrospect
frantically foraging for fragments
of hope
trembling hands feebly attempt
to piece back together memories of
what once was
blindly painting portraits of
what could have been

the incurable disease of regret
robs righteousness as it
eats away at the very core of
the soul’s being
the only antidote being
choice
without reparations tongue,
the echo of silence is deafening

your fingers
strum the strings of my consciousness
playing melodies
i strive to hear with my
full ear
my
wide eyes
my
naked soul…

hand in hand
we stroll thru mirrored landscapes
painted with the
very colors of my being..

i see fractured pieces of myself
scatter like monarchs
in the dry wind..

once hollow echos swell
with the reverb
of Faith
as glittering shards,
my facets,
dance towards the mosaic of
my Truth, unfinished..

whispers of righteousness
murmur softly
within my cerebral acreage..

and i thank you…