It’s so quiet here it makes me tired. The calm is allowing flashbacks of sitting in school watching cars drive by through the window. I couldn’t wait to grow up and be outside the school walls, like the adults in those cars.

Feeling caged through my childhood until graduation, then the same into adulthood and entering the workforce.

Kessler is refusing to leave the library. And why am I asking her to? We have nowhere else to be. Why can’t I just sit here and enjoy her? Why can’t I be present?

The same feeling of being trapped coming up inside me. My brain automatically wants to find an escape regardless of the circumstances.

How do I retrain it? What practices can help me feel daily content in the present?

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives if that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns. Entangled in the trance of unworthiness, we grow accustomed to caging ourselves in with self-judgement and anxiety, with restlessness and dissatisfaction.” – Tara Brach from Radical Acceptance

Taylor