Reading, loneliness, obsession and the acceleration of time

One of my character traits is that I tend to grip onto things tightly. For example, if I am thinking about a math problem, I will have a very difficult time transitioning to other activities, like interacting with others, eating and sleeping. Or, I will get into a series of novels and then spend eight hours a day reading through it for weeks on end. It doesn't help that I have a kind of low-level persistent social anxiety and that I find interacting with people stressful either. That tends to reinforce my reclusive tendencies. Interlaced with this tendency to engage in obsessive streaks (which might make you think of someone on speed) is a tendency to withdraw from the world through vegging out and sleeping a lot. Just this afternoon, I decided to take a three hour nap, not because I really needed it, but because I like to sleep. In analyzing this seemingly unhealthy behavior of mine, I am drawn to the question of whether it really is unhealthy or unwise, and to make basic judgment calls like that, one has to have some idea of what the purpose of life is, if there is a purpose. In the past I've subscribed to the belief that the purpose of life is to help others and to increase the happiness level in the universe for all, and I still think this is true, but somehow it is not informing my actions on a gut level. I have some kind of block that I need to process that is keeping me from connecting to this feeling. As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps a good focus of at least a portion of my meditation sessions each day might be to ask the question "what do I want to do with this life?" That might be a good way to deal with this block.

Looking back just a few minutes to the title of this post, I see that I still need to hit on the acceleration of time. This is a phenomenon familiar to all who are old enough. The amount of perceived time each year keeps going down. It is a stark reminder of my own mortality, a kind of gut punch that my life is over far more quickly than I anticipated. I know that this is just the natural way of things, and that everything which is born also dies. Buddhism encourages the contemplation of death so that when it happens, you will have familiarized yourself with it, and it won't involve as much suffering. One of the ways of rooting out a fear of death is to realize that we are actually dying all the time. When we transition from one moment to the next, there is a real sense in which one person has died and another was born. The idea of a continuous entity called me which persists from moment to moment is demonstrably illusory. There are two issues that I have with this completely accurate analysis. One is that it is difficult to maintain a perception of the illusory nature of reality. The habit of imputing a solid I onto a string of experiences is very strong and not easy to break. It doesn't help that 99.9% of people share the delusion of solidity and that it is strongly reinforced by our culture. The second issue is that the illusory nature of reality can so easily turn into a feeling of hopelessness that there is no inherent meaning in anything. This is a kind of nihilism, which is often warned about in Buddhist texts as being an incorrect view. I myself have entered into this region, and I think it may partially explain the "block" I was talking about in the first paragraph, and the "ennui" I referred to in a previous post. I asked my mentor about this and his suggestion was to concentrate on the emptiness or illusory nature of nihilism, which makes sense as I think about it now. (It sounded a little trite at the time.) I really am clinging in some ways to this sort of self-analysis and the image of hopelessness, which means I am imputing reality onto something. Perhaps this is a good second focus for daily contemplation and meditation:  the emptiness of nihilism.

Will report back!