Viva Pinata

See, this is exactly what I am talking about.

The first three days of the fast were a relative breeze. Yes, getting up an hour earlier and finally reinstituting my workout took a little stretching, but my relationship with food has been such that dropping brekkie is not big deal, nor avoiding snacking. TV, social media, and video games are all dispensible pleasures.

But today is hard, because today was actually my first bad day where I was also keeping disciplines.

I had a bad day at work. Not the kind of bad day that has life altering consequences, but just a steady day of little defeats that added up to a day that some parts of me wished I had not logged on for. I've had plenty of days like this in the past--I imagine we've all had a few.

But what I am patently unused to is processing this kind of day without any distractions, and with the gentle pressure of having new disciplines and deferred comforts.

What I can't escape is the constant intrusive need to analyze the problems that I should be leaving off to solve tomorrow. My brain spins on what I need to do tomorrow, whether there is anything that I have missed, what lines of inquiry I need to open, and was there anything that I could have done differently at any point upstream in the last six months that would have changed any of it.

I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but I also keep checking again. Not trusting the due dilligence on the analysis.

I've always struggled with shutting down what I think of as 'the background processes'. The 45 minute walk home from work was great in that regard, because walking in the dark through some slightly 'eh' neighborhoods required alertness, so it helped jump the transition from work brain to normal brain.

Unfortuantely, gentrification has pushed the borders of the nearest sketchy neighborhood out further than I care to venture in this cold, so that avenue of cognitive reset is not open to me.

I tried reading, but my focus is terrible. I did bedtime with my children, prayers, readings, memory work, and discussion of the readings, but the background processes insist upon themselves. 'The work is not yet done', they insist.

Truly, I see myself so clearly in the words of the psalmist in the psalm I just read with my children:

13 You make us a reproach to our neighbors,
A scorn and a derision to those all around us.
14 You make us a byword among the nations,
A shaking of the head among the peoples.
15 My dishonor is continually before me,
And the shame of my face has covered me

It do be like that sometimes. 

The reality is that I am weak. The disappointments, frustrations, and challenges of a long day are more than I can weather gracefully without some kind of chemical or digital distraction. This constant paging will rob me of sleep tonight. Not because I am in any danger, or anyone was mean to me, or it could not wait until tomorrow, but because my brain has to beat each of the problems that I encountered today like a pinata until it yields up its sweet secrets.

So, I get the humbling experience of needing to deal with real problems like a human being, and not like a lab rat that gets to jump on the little red button that says 'pleasure.'

No worries, there is no risk of me jumping on that button. The only real risk is what might happen to me if Emma says something to me again and is met by a blank stare.

In that event, there may be a new pinata to viva.