hope

When I get stuck in rumination, everything seems pointless. My goals seem pointless. Every one of them. My situation seems hopeless. I'm doomed. I'm desperate, I'm scared. There's no way forward. Looking ahead, there's no path. 

But there's a ray of hope in my life now. Despite what seems like an absolute barrage of unsolvable problems that are all interconnected making my situation hopeless, when I just do my goals, I'm able to, at least for a few moments, somehow get out from under the barrage and feel OK. I've never really done that before because I always saw my goals from within my rumination, so they seemed pointless and difficult. 

Because I've been working through a really difficult process for a while, I've been building good habits by having what David Powers calls a fierce commitment to my daily goals. But the rumination seems to win. It seems to have the force of inviolable facts. My situation really seems hopeless and desperate. 

But something is happening. When I'm stuck in these cycles of panic and defeat and pain that are so hard to break out of, I do something now that I didn't used to do. I focus on my goals and I look at the next one that I haven't done yet and I do it, or at least I try to. It's hard, but the challenge is just psychological. Like making art for example. All things being equal, there's nothing hard about it. It's the opposite - it's very enjoyable and satisfying. But somehow, when I want to do it, I feel like I can't. It seems really difficult and even painful, and I realize now that that's because of my rumination. My rumination demands all my attention and won't allow me to really engage with anything else. 

In the past, that stopped me from doing art and writing and other things that I want to do. It just seemed too hard. Then I would get desperate and make a bit of an effort, but what I did wasn't that good. It was half-hearted. But in the last few months I've been forcing myself to do art every day. And I'm happy with the art I'm making. I'm invested in it. 

When rumination really gets the best of me, it seems hard to do art again. It doesn't make sense but I think, 'I just can't do it'. I can't give it my attention. But because I've made it into a habit, I can just push myself and do it. And I'm being really creative. I'm not dragging my feet and doing it mechanically - I'm really making art. 

And when I do that it changes my perspective. The rumination, which is so oppressive and consuming, recedes, at least for a moment. A similar principle applies to all 41 of my daily goals, though I still don't manage to get through all of them in a day. 

My daily goals are my new life that has begun as I have emerged from some crises that I've gone through in recent years, and in some ways, my whole life. My vision is that they will grow and will become my actual life, and the rumination and crises will pass. 

I don't really believe in that at the moment though. I believe in it as a possibility, but I feel defeated and things look very bleak. But thinking about it stirs something in me. Like, my daily goals are a life. That's pretty powerful. And I think rumination is like a storm. It may take time but the life will grow and the storm will pass. That's not speculation, it's inevitable.