Aim for the Head!

I just woke up in the middle of the night, which I don't do much anymore, and for some reason I started thinking about why the story of my closets last January seems to come up so much in my blog. I think it's really where things started happening for me in some significant ways. Looking back it might be more meaningful than I realized at the time.

Art by League of 1

At the time it was a conscious decision to start living in the present moment more. I knew I had issues with getting caught up with focusing too much on the future and living in my head. I still live in my head too much, but I'm much better at getting out of the future. I noticed that I'm much happier when I focus on the now. I get myself in trouble when I let myself get entangled in the future.

I live alone so I was able to attack it by pulling everything out of both my hall closet and my bedroom closet and even my linen closet and putting it on the floor. I wanted the closets to be completely empty and nothing to go back in them unless it belonged. I knew it was not the normal way to do things, but it was what I needed at the time.

I needed to face it. I needed to make sure I didn't do a little bit and then not really do it completely. I needed to make sure I didn't just organize it without really purging and getting rid of everything that needed to go because I got tired in the middle of doing it. I needed it to be done right.

Looking back at that now, I see that perhaps, for me, it was so important a task because it visually represented denial. I could keep the house clean and neat and still have my closets filled with crap I didn't need, didn't want, and that wasn't organized the way I wanted. Other people might never see it, but I knew it was there. I might not think about it all the time, but when I opened the closet doors, there it was weighing me down and reminding me that my shit was not as together as I made it out to be.

If I wanted to break through denial in other areas of my life, maybe I needed to break through there first. Maybe I needed to literally walk through and over the excess and the mess in my house for a month and look at it to see it. Maybe I needed to slowly chip away at it an hour a day and then live my life with the mess still with me to finally see that I can survive with the mess and if I just keep working at it, I will eventually get some control over the mess.

Art by Justin Hillgrove 

If I just put the mess back in the closet so I can live my life without looking at it, I will never get control of it. I may look like I have control of it, but it's still there. It's still controlling me from behind those doors and drawers.

Something I have always loved about the idea of zombies is that they are ugly. They are ugly yet they really aren't They aren't ugly because they were beautiful human beings and spirits once. Something happened to them that took away their souls and made them hunger for the flesh of the living to keep them alive. But they are not malicious. They have no ill-will. No evil intent.

They are ugly and they force us to look at them. There is so much ugly in life that must be faced. Like a zombie, even though the ugly in our lives might not have intentional evil intent, it still must be lived with at times. But often it must simply be killed. You can't just hide, wound or push away the zombie that is attacking you. It will keep coming. We can't just hide or push away denial or mess in our lives; it will keep coming. We must face it and we must kill it.

Aim for the head!!!