Butterflies

I've been reading a lot this week about living in the moment, embracing the now.  Initially I thought that  this meant ''seizing the day'', making things happen and changing what needed changing fearlessly and without regret.  But the more I read I realise it is really not about that at all. It's about stopping and feeling. About being in A moment and feeling it - acknowledging it for all it has in it, the good the bad and the ugly.  Not comparing it to what was, or what might or could be.  But owning and feeling the moment for whatever 'the moment' is.

Right now, I'm really not enjoying living in the moment.  Exactly one year ago today I was engulfed in more sadness that I could have imagined possible.  A  few people knew about it - and a few more thought they did -  but almost no-one knew the actual details, save one or two trusted friends, and the Doctor who was urging me to start taking medication (I lasted two days before deciding it made me worse not better, and will not go ''there'' again - for how can you truly live in the moment if the moment is dulled by chemicals?)

My 'seizing the day' action was to choose to be continue being searingly, bravely honest with someone, and asking them to be the same with me, and, as a result of that, I came out of those depths and moved into a new way of normal.  A few weeks earlier it would have been incomprehensible that I would have been in this position at all, and so today it seems absolutely beyond belief that I am here again.

The details of what happened in the ensuing year,  and how I came to be in a place of sadness again  are kind of irrelevant  - the purpose of my writing is to simply try and make sense of how I feel today. And today I feel...the sun is too bright, the night too dark, voices too soft, music too loud. My mind is full and yet empty, I feel everything and nothing.  I have clarity and total fogginess. I am, curiously. both insanely happy and insanely sad. There's a sense of inevitability and normalcy about where I am in life now, and yet also the feeling that my world has been knocked off its axis and literally onto another one.

I understand that this will pass. It has before. These feelings will, most likely, happen again - that's life right? We live, we love, we lose, and we gain again.

To risk love of any kind,  and to be vulnerable means to risk pain and loss. That I understand.  There are no guarantees in life, no matter how much we want them, offer or promise them, or even endeavour to deliver on them.  Believing this is also a part of living in the moment, because it has to be.  It's the price we pay for being human.

But for today, thoughts really are like butterflies...