Operation Achieve Anything: Day Ninety-Eight, Dateline 4-8-2018
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“When your mother is made and asks you, ‘Do I look stupid?’ it’s best not to answer her.”
Good morning Crickets. Welcome to day number ninety-eight of Operation Achieve Anything. Sorry for the drunken rambling that made up yesterday’s post, it’s been a while since I’ve been actively drunk while writing. Where I used to love to drink while writing, now that I’m down to only binge drinking once or twice a month, I now try to wait until all of my responsibilities for the day are over.
What ended up happening yesterday was, I woke around four o’clock in the AM with half a box of wine remaining from drinking myself into an early sleep the night before. Since I did crash so early, I woke with enough energy that I knew it would be impossible to simply roll over and go to sleep, so I decided to polish off the rest of the drink that I left beside my computer.
Of course, since I can never stop at just one, after finishing the drink I decided that my SNL review was already complete so all that I had to do was write my Daily Breaker post, publish everything and then be done for the day so I could actually enjoy the drinking, considering this first drink resolved any ickiness I was feeling from drinking the night before, further proving the concept of the hair of the dog.
Luckily, the assignment for yesterday was an easy one where the book simply wanted me to find a quiet space in order to practice an abridged version of meditation, meaning that it just wanted me to enjoy the silence without worrying about trying to use any official meditation techniques since the book seemed to hint at that we’d be getting to that later on.
I have a real long history with meditation where I’ve wanted to learn how to do it correctly to help balance my bipolar mind. I’ve bought books to attempt to learn and even attended a couple classes that tried to teach various technics. Though these efforts to learn have worked to get me relaxed a little, I always feel like I’m not getting it right because it’s never led to that magical sense of finding inner peace that’s often promised.
Though I’ve yet to figure out how to get it to work for me, I still believe that meditation could be a useful tool if I could just get it right, so I like lessons like these that remind me to try to get back on the bull. Yesterday, while still drunk, I decided to sit in silence, thinking that being in the condition I was in, my foggy mind might not be as worried about whether or not I was sticking to any rules. That led to my midday nap.
I don’t know whether or not the sleeping aspect invalidated my effort but, to me, I enjoyed the silence enough that it sent me into a slumber, which makes it good enough for me. I also considered this to be a success because there were no actual rules.
For some reason, I thought that the Achieve Anything… book said that it was going to be focusing on meditation over the next couple of days but then today’s assignment started out by saying that the lessons were going to focus on getting back to thinking like a child over the next couple of days. By thinking like a kid the books wants me to see the world through fresh eyes and try to get to that point where you can be almost offensively honest when experiencing new things.
That’s not to say that I’m now supposed to blurt out whatever’s on my mind at any given time like a child might, but to have the blatant honesty play a part in sorting through information within my head. The actual assignment for the day is to practice the art of silence and try to listen more than I speak. This is going to be super easy considering everyone in the house is either working, out and about having fun, or traveling on vacation, there’s a chance that I could go this entire day without speaking with anyone whether or not I want to.
Of course, as always, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see how things turned out. Until then, it’s now that time for me to wrap this thing up by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
