MM MECC ANICA

Well shit. I thought I’d never say that, but here we are. What started as a focused meditation turned into an accidental CNTL ALT DELETE after I made a decision to do a long meditation. The focus — finding compassion for the orange man and the regime that comes from it. After an hour of breath work I’m in an awesome state to start digesting this concept. I decide to take a small amount of medicine to further aid in the process.

Back into breath work supplemented by frequencies flowing from earbuds, I go deeper and deeper until the only thoughts I have are my interpretations of the person and the caustic fallout of their decisions echoing through our lives and culture. Like a glitching computer, I feel and experience dozens of scenarios and come back to the same place; it’s like watching a childhood bully trying to control their playground to mask their own sadness and hurt. I transition to seeing other people I’ve encountered with similar traits and spend time in those memories and then… fuck… I see myself.

In the utter blackness and the stillness of my mind, a scene unfolds. It’s not a visual scene, though it has some semblance of three dimensional space and time. In this space I can’t form words but fully feel and comprehend everything. Throughout this process I have to bring myself in and out of the elevated experience to force words to come out of my mouth so that I properly account for what is happening. Maybe this means I successfully shut off my thinking brain and only was feeling.

While hard to describe how I’m seeing this without seeing this, a small figure appears from the darkness of a doorway down a hallway. Its scratchy penciled form is clearly that of a child, yet it moves with the crawling gait of an arachnid. It partially enters light still finding comfort in the shadows it came from; no introduction is necessary, it is a facet of me. This darkness didn’t come from one event or a hundred. It grew one tiny cut at a time. Those cuts weren’t always intentional, but, the figure held onto the meaning and kept feeding and developing off of them in the shadows.

I’ve never considered myself a sad person; fearful yes, but in the last year I’ve had a number of healers recognize it in me as I pass it off as momentary feeling or something new. Well fuck, here it is dude.

This fearful and sad ‘me’ guide ignites an adventure — walking us through our childhood to present, illustrating how it (sadness and fear) drove so many personality traits and decisions in my life. The fears of being weak, incapable, and inadequate further fueled this sadness inside. In efforts to compensate, I chased women, gear, hunting and motorsports, hoping the capability in those offset the feelings I was missing inside. Even with successes fueled by the deeply entrenched needs, I was left without presence and experience, as I looked to refuel with the next piece of gear, bike, woman or outdoor pursuit. Seeing those attempted conquests with my new eyes and prospective, I can see they weren’t fully rooted in sadness, but they weren’t experienced to the fullness I am capable of now.

Since childhood, while I’ve been athletic, I’ve been a thin person and it was something constantly in my mind as a weakness generating a fear preventing me from full experience. When it comes to gear, this sadness about how I am built, forced me to modify tools, guns, bicycles, vehicles, always chasing every ounce, every bit of performance that I could with my time and money. I found moments of pride in my ability to learn, transform and evolve objects beyond what they were, however, it was fueled by those dark feelings. That pride came with an unquenchable thirst for more, something always limited by time or money, and well, without more of those, I’d never get where I wanted. My obsessions with lightening the load with titanium and carbon fiber all were rooted in alleviating this perceived weakness. The obsession was always on the object of my focus not being developed enough, to deflect from my own development as the cause of weakness and incapability.

Hunting; while I have felt a deep primal connection to it since childhood, wasn’t always about a quality source of meat or engaging with the beautiful outdoors; it was often about controlling something and what it meant about me if I succeeded. The further I hiked, the harder I made it for myself, the more I shot and accomplished the more whole I thought I would be; but this too arrived at the point of, there is no finish line. There is always further, better, more, more, more, and I wasn’t that, so even at my fittest, best shooting, most capable, I was not enough for myself.

Sadly, my relationships with women over the years weren’t much different from hunting. The same sadness bleed into every conquest or relationship I had. All of my actions were about me feeling desired and wanted to cover the internal sadness around weakness and incapability.

While not as strongly, the same fear and sadness carried me through the first 15-20 years of my career was well. My intelligence and capability to learn was less controlled by fear and more easily leveraged than the other aspects of me, so I leaned into it. That came with the same insecurity when it was challenged or not recognized.

So there I was, 5 hours later on a couch, having relived ages 5-39 through a lense of sadness controlled decision making. My conclusion, fuck, it must suck to be the orange man, because deep down, it sucked to be me feeling those ways about myself and never recognizing it. The thousands of tiny cuts that developed that sadness in me must be so exponentially shittier for him to have made a person that needs the things he is currently doing to try and fill that fearful and sad hole inside of himself. Fuck.

Don’t worry, titanium, carbon fiber, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, tools and all the other fun shit isn’t going way. There is no problem with them as they are, only my old attachments to what they meant to me and what I expected them to do for me. I’m still skinny, and thats ok. A little mechanically added capability won’t hurt as long as I don’t attach to it as an identity or do it to compensate for sadness and fear. Surrendering to this fear and sadness is also surrendering to the good that has been driven by it. Now cognizant of the impact it has had on me, I will better make decisions before that next purchase, starting a new connection or desiring an experience.