I mean, I did some work. But Jerry was occupied with a rock-hard deadline in the afternoon, and it turned out the deployment of my software yesterday actually failed for some unknown reason. And then for more unknown reasons, he couldn't build my code. So I hung around and tweaked things all day, and then went to the company's annual kick-off meeting that I would have been better off missing, then bailed on class even though there was a guest instructor tonight.
So very tired. I didn't wake up gasping last night, but I did jerk awake a couple times this evening when I tried to take a nap. There's a medical term for it; for me it happens as I'm just falling asleep and starting to dream, and it's always some kind of an impact that jerks me awake, like I'm dreaming that I'm hitting a tennis ball or (tonight) stepping down from a curb. I don't really know what it means--I'm under-rested and still have a lot of stuff processing in my head, so hopefully getting to bed earlier and listening to what I'm feeling will clear my head a bit. I'll be less tired with more processing.
Standing outside the Cambridge Zen Center once a long time ago, someone once asked me about Zen and hope. I told her I thought hope was the other side of fear, because in both cases you have these ideas about what you do and don't want to happen, and you're not just taking things as they are. Right now I have a flood of hopes and fears, and I'm just starting to identify them all and realize that they're all thinking and not Being. I'm discovering that in Being, sex doesn't go away; but I can develop the presence of mind and awareness so that it doesn't take over, and I can make good choices about it.
I think the pattern I'm following here is that as soon as my internal life starts to feel calm, I find something or someone else that I set aside last year, and try to re-integrate it/them into my life, with all the attendant emotions that caused me to set it/them aside to begin with. Like I say, this is a good thing; just complex, and turbulent. As with sexual attraction, it's not necessary to try and squash these things, and in fact you probably can't; part of Zen is letting things happen, flowing with change. The hard part, for me, is that to deal with the world as it really is has a brute honesty to it that I still find takes some effort. So much easier in the short run to just hide from it all.
Time for bed. Wish me some spasm-free sleep.