After a long stint of constant drinking (years of it, actually), I have to remind myself now that real life (the life I want for myself) is a complex of the good, the blah, and the ugly. I'm very much committed to my sobriety but this is one of my blah days. My mood is rather grey and dull (numbing) as the day outside and I'm having to force myself to work.
Don't get me wrong: I love my work and I derive a lot of meaning out of it. I feel that it's my rightful place and where I need to be. It's just that, like the weather outside and so much in life I guess, it's kind of hard to reframe without it feeling like I'm forcing (foisting(?)) myself to something that I'm not necessarily into right now. So, I'm not forcing myself into anything but trying to be mindful of how I'm feeling from day-to-day, from moment-to-moment.
Well, maybe it's more like I'm trying to remind myself clearly where I came from. It's a dark little place that fed on my soul and my bad memories and regurgitating them back in my face; don't want that!
I need an even keel even through the dullness and the sometimes tumultuous waters, not a mindless wandering and bumping around in the little black hole called "oblivion". -I don't know why I used to think or, more honestly, uncritically assumed that it was better than my navel-gazing.
There is an actual word for navel-gazing: omphaloskepsis. It comes from ancient Greek, that language of cool ideas and nerdy words, and it derives from the words from the Ancient Greek: ὀμφᾰλός (omphalós, lit. 'navel') and σκέψῐς (sképsis, lit. 'viewing, examination, speculation').
I love ancient Greek though I can't read nor speak it. So, I think a more accurate expression would be: I love well-rendered English translations of ancient Greek. Ancient Greek articulates so well thoughts that we could not, on our own, but perceive vaguely such that academia is left to sputter: "Yeah, what he said..."
Jay
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