Being Mindful and Catching the rest of that 99% of life

I've begun to do volunteer work with a local literary journal that
just published its first edition. I'm taking care of their data entry
for subscribers.

Yesterday, I was so swamped with work issues and problems, and nothing
seemed to go my way. Spent the weekend doing social things and my
hives were flaring up as as result of the crap I ate as well. So, by
the end of the day, I felt stressed out and not really feeling as
though I could honestly do this work with a sense of mindfulness. I
very nearly asked Linda if I could go off and meditate somewhere
before beginning the work; but when I arrived, she was hurrying
through catching me up on things and rushing out to some sort of show.

Before I knew it, I was sitting in front of the Mac, typing away at
the various things I had gone to work on, and the stress had floated
out of my system. After working for a couple of hours, I packed up.
As I walked to my car, I looked beyond the car to where sat a pond,
and I saw a family of geese with lots of goslings waddling about,
enjoying the lawn and the beautiful evening. It made me realize that
of the month or so that I've been going to that place to work, I'd not
really noticed how beautiful the pond was. On the other side of the
driveway was a pen of what looked like fresh vegetables. I remember
reading a story that linda wrote about her first chicks, and how she
lost them to some sort of disease. I'll have to see if she still has
chickens.

The concept of mindfulness and stopping to smell the roses is a
constant, daily thing that I need to keep paying attention to. I've
had a lifetime of not giving a shit about roses and anything else but
getting from where I am to where I want to be going, and being blind
to all of the stuff in between.

If you take a straight line, and look at the two endpoints, you'll
notice that 99.99% of the line is all of the stuff in between the two
endpoints. How much of life have I missed?

Blogging stories

I've been mulling over the idea on how to blog more honestly about
things happening in my life, and realized that it would make sense for
me to keep a second, concurrent but anonymous blog that is a purely
storytelling blog. Not mentioning anyones name, not even having 100%
correlation to anyone in particular, but it will let me blog about the
peculiarities of life, living, and the colorfulness and uniqueness of
people I meet without having any risk at all with offending anyone.
There have been a lot of real-life stories in this blog, and that
mixed up with the few fictional pieces, makes its focus blurred. It's
time to evolve this setup in a more workable manner, so that I can
have a blog simply for my creations.

I will keep this blog as a story of my journey, which will be more
like a diary, and I'm going to create a totally separate and unrelated
blog for fictional stories, which will really be variants of what I
see in my real life turned to fictional story form. I will not point
the two blogs to each other in any way so that I can use the second
blog to prattle on and explore my creativity without stressing out
about hurting anyones feelings. That's seriously bad, and I simply
don't want to do that. However, I do want to take the caricatures
that people often present and use those caricatures as models for
fictional characters. People are just too interesting for me to just
prattle on about only "safe" things. I want to go beyond safe and get
to "honest". (but in a nonhurtful way, so both anonymously, and also
through the use of creative fiction or nonfiction, but written via
anonymous pen, where there's no way whatsoever to ever map the story
to any person).

I guess I mention this here, because it's my next step in my journey.
I will keep this blog to allow myself a forum for rambling about how
that other process is going, but only in a general way.