Joy is jumping off a cliff and building your parachute on the way down

40 years old, and I still can’t bear the monotony of working.

For seven months I’ve been working as a cleaner in Pizza Hut: mopping, scrubbing, rubbing shoulders with acne-ridden cretins and rehearsing my grievances.

I thought at first that it might do something for my humility.

It didn’t.

It did do something for my awareness though, I have to admit. It was just me, God, the hoover and the incessantly chattering nonsense of my thinking.

I got quite used to stepping off the thought train at will, and observing it clatter ludicrously past from the platform.

There were even a couple of days when my thinking ceased completely, and those were days of joy.

joy is the absence of thought

I sat amongst the people on the bus joyfully; I took out the rubbish joyfully; I scrubbed toilets joyfully; I watched the traffic joyfully (although I didn’t label it as traffic because there was no thought and I was in joy, and everything was  God experiencing Himself on the white screen of my awareness).

Moments like that are just experiences though, and it is the nature of experiences to pass.

The problem with the human experience is that we’re consumed with terminal wanting, and forever chasing something that can only ever be temporary.

nirvana is temporary

enlightenment is an illusion

More recently I have noticed resentment and dissatisfaction creeping back in.

Creeping?

THUNDERING.

No longer am I thinking about how fortunate I am to be able to work, when by rights I should be dead: no.

I am thinking about how this is a job for a retard, which I am so clearly not.

Anyway, so I quit my job. It’s only the last in a line of decisions which to an outsider might seem ill-advised. But the fact is this: I am feeling rebellious. Is it God’s will that I suffer a situation intolerable to me, and just take endless inventory around it looking for “my part” in my discontentedness, for fear that an impulsive act might eventually lead to my downfall, or is it God’s will that I say a loud “fuck it”, throw down my broom (so to speak) and rely upon Him to help me weather the consequences, whatever they may be? And anyway, sometimes I want what I want.

I mean, am I still living in fear here, or what?

Or do I believe that whatever my actions, everything will be as it should be?

So just for today I will be practicing Step 3 like this:

joy is jumping off a cliff and building your parachute on the way down