Vineeto: When will you come out of your ivory tower and play?
Andrew: (…) My career has been an accumulation of experiences which have made me a valuable commodity. As a person in a chair in front of a screen, or on the phone, or in person.
I am the commodity. I sell myself, through time, to others.
So this particular interest, in building algorithmic trading bots, it quite different.
I have to extend myself, not as a commodity, but as a creator.
That’s what got me feeling that I was terrified of the future. That it was never worth extending effort to improve my lot. I would dream of it, fantasy being a daily thing, but really build it? No. I would not extend myself.
So, to put more clearly what I was feeling about time;
‘I’ am ‘time’. ‘I’ am not actual time, ‘I’ am imagining ‘time’. A ‘time’ when I will be happy.
Ok, now I know what you mean by ‘I’ am ‘time’, that you are talking about an imaginary time “when you will be happy”. Hence your sentence would better read – ‘I am living in an imaginary time’. This way it becomes obvious what an ineffective enterprise it is to imagine to be happy some day in the future instead of doing something right here, right now, to be happy, isn’t it?
Hence my suggestion to ‘come out and play’.
Andrew: This is what I was thinking about. The disconnect between what I am doing and feeling, and that ‘time’ in the future.
Why do ‘I’ persist to feel bad about doing anything to look after the very actual me that will wake up tomorrow?
I have spent so much of my life expecting life to end suddenly. (With a lot of terror and apocalyptic results before the end).
What is it that I am missing here?
Mmh, perhaps what you are missing is recognizing that there is fear? And being afraid of this fear?
Andrew: For 49 years I have woken up in the morning, but there was never a day I really took proper care of the fact that was likely to keep happening.
Does that make sense? That’s the feeling there.
A fantasy ‘future’ was the only ‘future’.
Yet here I am. And, probably will remain. (link)
Now that you have faced the fact that you are indeed here in this place and now in this moment in time, and that merely imagining a happy future will not be powerful enough to bring it about – do you perhaps have the necessary wherewithal to allow this fear to come to the surface? In other words, are you ready to not fight the fear that is there?
I remember a correspondence from you to the mailing list where you said you ‘girded yourself for battle every morning’ (it is not in the archives so Richard did not respond) but it remained in my memory because it struck me at the time as a hard and tiresome existence. In this post it appears that you are looking for a different, more happy modus operandi, so perhaps stopping the fight (against yourself) might now have a certain appeal to you.
Here is my recommendation based on personal experience from feeling being ‘Vineeto’ and the success of other people’s reports as well –
Vineeto: … stop fighting your pain and stop fighting the feelings you experience. Any battle against yourself only fuels the feelings and the [somatic] pain by increasing the power of ‘you’ to make you feel bad. Personally, feeling being ‘Vineeto’ found that the moment she stopped fighting the feeling (i.e. by being afraid of it), it instantly diminished.
From there, seeing the success of stopping the battle against yourself, you might be able to get to a reasonable feeling good, a little better than neutral. (link).
Andrew: I feel like writing more.
I do want to change.
Yeah, that’s what I want to say. [Emphasis added]. (link)
This is excellent, Andrew, a propitious time to do that.
Cheers Vineeto