Bulging Right Eye Tumor

I felt almost a little panicked before breakfast today: Am I on a diet if I have to have oatmeal instead of the wonderful toast I have on work days? (Because there is not time to have the salad I have on non-work days.) I know there is gluten-free bread and maybe I’ll bump into a great one, but I would generally rather eat something simpler than something highly processed with lots of ingredients. The good news is that today’s oatmeal very closely approximated the toast.

In pot: Half a cup of gluten-free organic rolled oats, a cup of water, about half a cup of toasted walnuts, half a teaspoon of Ceylon cinnamon. In bowl: A cup or so of thawed frozen blueberries, and a chopped-up apple. Add the former to the latter. On top: A big dollop of walnut or cashew butter and a tablespoon or so of walnut oil. Delicious! Oh! I forgot the fresh minced ginger. I’ll add that from now on.

Several months ago, a close associate mentioned that she does not have a to do list. I haven’t thought of that consciously every moment since then, but I think it’s been nagging at me subconsciously around the clock: Without a to-do list, how does she know what to do?!?

My father was Mr. To Do List, and I am Mrs. To Do List. (While the person who claims not to have a to do list is as closely related to my father as I am.) As I have mentioned here more than once, the only thing that terminated my father’s to do list was getting pancreatic cancer and finding himself suddenly living in a retirement community where most of the objects associated with the tasks on his list were no longer available. He said some of the items dated back 50 years.

Today I was working on this and that, and found myself stressed out and with the same nagging headache I have now had for days, which I hope is a vestibular migraine but which I secretly suspect is a brain tumor; my right eye feels weird. I’m pretty sure there’s a bulging tumor behind my right eye.

My strategy lately has been to eliminate various components of my life in hopes that I will find myself having what I read about what some guy who lives on a desert island all by himself claims to have: a serene relationship with time. I want that so much.

I have given up my whole entire job, which you would think would help a lot, but today, as I stressed out about whatever, it was suddenly obvious that it does not matter how much stuff I X out: I will often be stressed out because my mode of living, governed as it is by my to do list and by compulsive schedule making, reliably generates stress. It is very similar to what they call in Alcoholics Anonymous the “geographic cure”: Maybe if I lived in Colorado, I wouldn’t drink as much.

I will never get to the end of my to do list. It produces new branches in all directions; it grows up, down, left and right; it bulges in all directions at once, like a basketball being inflated; categories develop subcategories. If I ever got done with the Tasks of Top Importance, it would be on to the Other Tasks, and then to what I call Things to Do Never, in recognition of the fact that I will never do them (though I would if I got through the other categories).

I think all I can do is just take a lot of entries off the list, all those things I will never, ever get to, and to try to have a more sane relationship with what remains, which I think means saying how much time I can spend today after I do what is necessary for well-being and a serene relationship with time and giving up the idea that if I stay up all night, I can get it done! It won’t get done even if I stay up all night every night for the rest of my life (which might not be that long if I make a habit of staying up all night every night).

So never mind for today estimated taxes on capital gains in this state versus that state. I guess a person without a to do list just does what obviously needs doing right now and does not worry about anything else? And then does she end up with a huge penalty in April because she did not pay her estimated taxes?

Perhaps a person can be mindful of her estimated taxes and also ask herself regularly what in this moment would constitute good self-care.

This bring us to formal meditation practice. From one week after 9/11 until a month or so ago, I missed precisely one day of sitting in meditation, and that one missed day was an accident.

I have lately returned to practicing in the style of Sayadaw U Tejaniya who, on the one hand, thinks sitting meditation is a fine thing to do, but who, on the other hand, doesn’t think you should do it if you’re merely trying to fulfill some clockly requirement and are going to sit there replaying over and over what you’d like to say to your cigarette-smoking neighbor. (Though on the third hand, I once read somewhere that meditation is whatever you do while you’re sitting in your designated meditation spot, a kind and generous idea I rather like.)

Tejaniya’s idea is that meditation starts when we wake up and concludes when we go to sleep, and that we don’t spend the time in between focusing grimly on whatever object is most noticeable in a given moment but rather in a relaxed, steady, calm, cool, easy observation of our own mind and body, in due time coming to notice how our thoughts, bodies, attitudes and emotions affect one another for good or ill.

This really has been interesting. I have the thought, “I can’t stand this,” and immediately there is a downturn in how my body generally feels, which confirms that, yep, I can’t stand it, and then my body feels even worse, etc. In mere seconds, my life feels completely untenable, thanks to that one little not-fully-observed thought, which could occur during sitting meditation or at any old time.

Accordingly, I decided to experiment with sitting for as long as it actually felt fruitful or for as long as I felt like sitting rather than for a set period of time. I decided to try skipping a day! I had always been afraid some teacher would grasp how rigid I was about my daily meditation and order me to skip a day on purpose. All on my own, I skipped a day. And then another. Soon I was sitting in meditation never, except for Tuesday nights with my teacher’s sangha.

Really, it felt fine. I don’t think I feel any worse than usual. I mean, I feel terrible. I feel crazed. Thoughts of suicide are appearing regularly. While I guess I would say it has been decades since that specifically has been the case, I can’t say there weren’t many, many times of feeling terrible and crazed during the 25 years when I meditated every single day except for one, and many, many times of life seeming easy and delightful.

I don’t know if the extra awfulness of this time is due to not meditating daily or just the horrendous pressure of having to make what is literally a life-changing decision or if it is mainly a manifestation of grief.

After my father died but before my mother did the same, I decided that I would absolutely commit suicide after my mother was gone. I got online to pick out a method and soon learned that nearly everyone who survives a suicide attempt reports that right after they did whatever they did, they regretted it. There was a horrible story of a child who took a lethal substance, readily available online at low cost, and then asked his mother for help, but it was too late.

I took suicide permanently off the table, with the counsel to myself that no one is going to follow me around making sure I conduct my life in a constructive manner. Only I can do that and only I can choose to do it.

I thought that was that, but I find those thoughts popping up again in maybe the past month.

I just feel so stressed and so miserable. I suppose here is where a person might consult their therapist, but that is absolutely off the table after she laughed merrily all through the story about the death of someone I knew.

I’m just going to have to figure it out. I do not have a suicide method picked out—wow, wave of dizziness as I typed that—and therefore I don’t have the supplies, and if I find myself choosing a method, yes, I will call the suicide hotline.

I was reading today online about how meditation actually rewires our brains. That seems to be in direct contrast with something Howie mentions regularly, which is that our meditation practice does not “trickle down” into the rest of our lives: The 30 minutes we spent meditating yesterday evening does not affect this moment. Or does it? Does meditation rewire the brain over time? If 25 years of daily meditation hasn't done the trick, would 26? Was it that one missed day that put the rewiring out of reach?

On the chance that the lack of regular sitting meditation is actually making things seem worse or genuinely and actually making them worse, I’ve decided to return to daily sitting meditation, even if it’s just for ten minutes.