Tranquility

Close your eyes, breathe in slowly, hold your breath for a moment, and then exhale.  What do you feel in that moment?  When you close your eyes, and think about nothing else but yourself, when you focus on nothing but your breath, when you feel that pressure and then the release, where does your mind go?

Sometimes we forget to breathe, it's an odd realisation, when you stop and think about the fact that your very survival is something that your body instinctively knows, and understands.  When you stop and focus on your breath, you take control of something explicitly, that your body was doing for you anyway.  You take control because you feel you have to in that moment because your attention is drawn to it, and because you have that feeling, of anxiety, of panic, or worry, that if you don't do it, you will die.  The truth is, if you don't do it consciously, the body will fight against you to try and regain control.

Breathing is something that comes naturally to you, yet it represents much more than a need to survive, it represents the fact that in this life there is so much that we worry about that we really don't need to.  You don't need to worry about making yourself breathe constantly, your body will do it for you, the same is true in life about many things.  We beset ourselves with worry, we panic over things that we ought not to control, but try to desperately when we think things won't go the way we want them to.  Learning to let go of that desire to control everything, to relax, and just breathe, is something that I've often struggled with.

There's a thought process that has guided me through life, and that thought process is to assume that the big things in life will solve themselves in time, I don't need to worry about them, the small things are what I need to focus on.  For the most part, that mentality has served me well.  With much of the trauma I have endured, this thought process has made it a lot easier to survive, because it is conducive to the same teachings that you are taught time and again through therapy and countless support groups "just take it one day at a time" - of course there are issues with some of those teachings, in particular the one where that saying originates, but we can save that topic of discussion for another day.  What is relevant here however is that these teachings are truths that surface time and again for the same reason - they are universal.  They are the conclusions we naturally draw when we stop trying to fight against our nature, when we accept the world for what it is and we accept our reality for what it is, before we learn how to live within that reality and be at peace with it.

Right now when I close my eyes I don't see anything.  When I stop and breathe and let go of everything I see and feel nothing.  That isn't intended to sound macabre, although I am aware that it might.  What I intend for you to realise is that emptiness, the nothingness, the void that I feel, is not borne of a dark place, but rather of a place of solace and respite.  I'm tired, physically, mentally, emotionally.  That emptiness, the calm, and tranquillity that I see is borne of the desire to rest, recover, and be reborn.  All of these things I know will take time, and all of these things I know I cannot control, they are not things that I can force, they must happen when they are meant to happen.  It's taken me a long time to get to this place of peace in my mind, I want to stay here, for how long I would want to, I do not know, for how long I could, that I do not know either, but I do know the only way I will find out is to let go and embrace this feeling.