Anxious Impatience

A few years ago, research showed that the average university student doing research on the web read an average of one-and-a-half lines of text before switching to another site. Whenever my email contains two or three specific requests, written on separate lines, it's extrememly rare that more than the first one is acknowledged.

How many minutes (seconds?) can you listen to someone in a one-on-one conversation, before you become very uncomfortable? How much of the time do you feel "driven" to act - as if you're chasing, or are being chased?

Could our restless discomfort originate from a profound sense of estrangement? Are we like addicts, suffering withdrawl, scrambling for any means of escape? Are we searching for home - security?

How does it feel? To be without a home Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone Bob Dylan

"As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

The middle way is wide open, but it’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.

Meditation provides a way for us to train in the middle way—in staying right on the spot. We are encouraged not to judge whatever arises in our mind. In fact, we are encouraged not to even grasp whatever arises in our mind. What we usually call good or bad we simply acknowledge as thinking, without all the usual drama that goes along with right and wrong. We are instructed to let the thoughts come and go as if touching a bubble with a feather. This straightforward discipline prepares us to stop struggling and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being." Pema Chodron http://www.lionsroar.com/six-kinds-of-loneliness/