T-T-T-Too Much Time on My Hands

We come from not being and march
   toward not being:
nothing between two nothings, zero
   between two zeros,
and since between two nothings
  nothing can be,
let's drink to the splendor of our
   not being our bodies. - Julia de Burgos in the Zen Calendar (April 6, 2004).

What is sought was the rapture of vertigo . . . the relapse . . . to nothingness. - Samuel Beckett in the Zen Calendar (September 10, 2006).

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say. - Will Durant in the Zen Calendar (April 4, 2003).

It takes a long time to understand nothing. - Edward Dahlberg in the Zen Calendar (September 29, 2006).

Nothing more than nothing can be said. - John Cage in the Zen Calendar (November 23, 2006).

Nothing is more real than nothing. - Samuel Beckett in the Zen Calendar (April 9, 2002).

Day 364.  And then there were two.  Remaining blogs, that is.  I hope the paradox of the Zen Calendar having so many different KINDS of quotes on Nothing isn't lost on my readers.  Seems like the most Zen thing to say about Nothing would be - obviously - NOTHING.  Duh.  I think I will do the honors.  I was going to write a super long blog about Nothing after concluding that it must be important because there was still a substantial number of quotes on the topic under the "Nothing" label in my pile.   In the interest of demonstrating my ever increasing grasp of Zen, here is what I have to say about Nothing:  (insert voluminous quantities of blank white screen space here . . . . . . )






Quotes that are more relevant to tonight's blog follow:

Too much time on my hands, it's ticking away with my sanity,
I've got too much time on my hands, it's hard to believe such a calamity.
I've got too much time on my hands, and it's ticking away from me.
T-t-t-too much time on my hands,
T-t-t-too much time on my hands. - Styx from "Too Much Time on My Hands."

Does it feel that your life's become a catastrophe?
Oh, it has to be 
For you to grow, Boy.
When you look through the years
and see what you could have been,
Oh, what you might have been
If you had had more time. - Supertramp from "Long Way Home."

Peak Experience!  Over the past week I randomly heard these two songs at separate times.  They are a couple of my favorites from the '70's.  I jotted down the section of lyrics that spoke to me at the time and transposed them for tonight's blog without realizing that one is about too much time and one is about not enough.  Until now.  Unbelievable.  Sometimes the Universe is so amazing I just want to kiss her frozen, sleet-encrusted ground.

Alrighty then.  On to another topic.  While performing my nine bows of supreme gratitude for the winter storm rendering all contact with the outside world wholly inadvisable, it occurred to me that I am an exceptional bow-er.  Wow.  Trust me to feel pride while performing bows intended to be humble and beseeching.  My ego knows no bounds.   I am an enigma.  An enigma who needs to execute about 99 more bows.

Last night as I lay listening to the sleet pelting the remaining trees on our little acre (in between traumatic flashbacks to the ice storm of 2007 - the ravages of which necessitated me and my Axe Man taking down 32 of our oak trees),  my Blogging Brain buzzed like Tri Delt tweets on Bid Day.  I couldn't turn it off until I jotted down some of the mottled, disjointed sentence fragments that demanded expression.  Strange how much my writing confidence increases after 2:00 a.m.  It is a wonder I had any brain waves at all - the weather outside was about 18 degrees below the temperature that usually sends me straight to the bottom of the pond.  As I attempted to capture the seemingly brilliant snatches of  literary inspiration, I realized I will probably never have the knack of expressing what I mean on my first try.  I am too enamoured with editing.  My apologies to Natalie Goldberg.  It is preposterous to expect a person with my advanced OC condition to Write Down My Bones.  Maybe I will write a book of my own:  Writing Down My Obsessive Compulsive Neural Pathways.  Has a nice ring to it. Very authentic.

I know why the Fat Guy smiles:  because life is a series of comical reminders that we have no earthly idea what the next - as yet unborn - moment holds.  Take, for example, my expectation that these final blogs would be somber, insight-laden tombs of Zen epiphanies.  Instead, I feel playful, punchy and amused.  Whimsical Zen.  More fickle than the latest Lindsay Lohan character on a Disney Channel movie.   I formulated three theories for my present  flippancy:  (1) I have been reading too much "Why We Suck" on my Kindle;  (2) I figured out there are six different episodes of "That 70's Show" on Cable TV on any given weekday and proceeded to watch them all;  (3) I've got t-t-t-too much time on my hands.  Whatever the reason, in Reality I am smiling like the Fat Guy.  And if I do much more Blizzard Baking, my belly will look like his, too.

Holy Crap!  Even when I thought I was writing Something, I have managed to write Nothing.  Apparently I mastered this stuff even better than I thought.  I am off to the cushion to meditate on coping with blizzards.  Meanwhile, the cyclist in me says, "Pedal through it."  The doc in me says, "There, there."  The Buddhist in me says, "

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc