Now in School and...Holy Crap!

Well, this was my first week of the first semester of my new life as "Student" and...Wow!  What the heck was I thinking??

Apparently I've set myself up for a bit of a rough semester, with calculus I and physics. My first day, I was SO worn out!  I went to bed at 7pm.

It's funny the oddness of self and definition that are coming into play at the moment...  There's a whirlwind of paradigm and expectation shifting; a flurry of mis-definition on just what i think it means to be a "me" in this particular point in space and time... I find my self floundering through my thoughs; trying to attach to familiar concepts of old, fighting the new environment it finds it's self (my self's self?) in... It's actually a bit rediculous, to be honest.

First of all, I'm surrounded by people for which this environment is nothing new.  Kids straight out of highschool, professional students for which this is just another class, for... I know much of what they expect me to know...but I don't think that I know it in the way they're expecting me to.  I have rough ideas on the concepts they're touching on, but when the kids in the class shout out the details of things I would need to look to a reference for....it's a bit intimidating.

My first day of classes was horribly rough... I kept thinking about how I could "just" (beware the "just!")  be at work right now!  I could be sipping tea, surfing around on the net, and working here and there to meet deadlines, but NOooo... Now I'm on the bus at 7:30am, exhausting my mind's capacity for thought by trying to forcefully wrap it around concepts and ideas that these brand new authority figures expect to be second nature.   Life could be so easy right now!  However I keep having to admit...this is what I've asked for.

I've already been there on the "easy" track.  Go to work, do some stuff, come home.  The only worries were what I would entertain my self with for the evening, and maybe where the next party was at.  Even though that sounds so nice right now, i force myself to remember just how miserable I was in that [now]seemingly blissful paradise. 

I keep coming back to the definitions of self that I've been holding on to... I went to my accupuncturist the week before school started;  it was the first time that she's shook her head dissapprovingly at the state I was in.   Apparently, in accu-talk, my energy centers were depleted, pulses weak on the whole.  She said it happens when we feel drained from the role we feel we're currently playing in life. 

I had to admit to her that I hadn't felt like my "self" lately.  She brought up the idea of self-definition, and how it can be psychologically rough to go from being a productive member of society to somebody unemployed.  It's the same old story that we've all heard before, and (supposedly) heeded the warnings of... The first thing people ask in social situations is "so, what do you do?"  I've tried avoiding these questions in the past by answering with things like "Oh, I read a lot, and practice martial arts."  But they don't even seem phased and immediately spring to the Real question of "No, I mean, what do you do for a living?"  For me, the past month and a half has found the bottom drop out of that question.

Y'know, it really took me by surprise that I may be having issues with the definition of my self in relation to societal standards. I mean, we've all heard about it so much!  Most of the self help/spiritual/inner-power material talks about how silly it is that society defines us by what we do for money, how we contribute to society, what we do to 'earn our keep', but y'know?  I have to admit that even with all this knowledge, hearing the message time and time again... I fell into it's trap. 

I live with my girlfriend, and it's been a bit odd having the day off, and then having her come home from working at a job around 5.  Know what it's felt like?  Like I had to "do" something, to be productive for the day, just so that I didn't feel bad when she came home.  I spent the first two weeks of my 'vacation' doing chores!   

When she came home after a day at work and asked what I did all day, I actually felt guilty when saying "oh..read a little...took a nap...played some video games."  like totally guilty.  I found my self doing dishes, and cleaning up every day just so that it seemed like I had accomplished something.  What a trap to fall into!  That's why it was interesting to see my accupuncturist key into the same idea, without me even saying anything to her.

And now, I have to re-define my self again.  Now, I am "a student".  Unfortunately, there's even More oddness to this:  I'm lapsing back into old thought and habits from High School!  My first day of class I had a memory-realization:  I hated school when i was in it!!   So, after my self tried to attach onto my old circumstances of blissful jobness, it turned it's focus towards the past...the pattern it fit in when I was in highschool! 

So, now yet another battlefront: the war "against" the past.  I've spent a lot of time trying to redefine attitudes - sluffing off the old skin while trying to generate the new, more appropriate to the situation.

I noticed an interesting thing while playing video games a long time ago.  Y'know those friends that come over, that you want to play a game with, but you're just so much better than them that they end up hating it?  Well whenever I run into that, I try to prune my playing-skills back a bit, so that it's more 'fare'.  The interesting thing that I noticed?  I can literally "tune in" to a different skill-set of playing;  find the frequency of action from an earlier stage of experience, and fall into it, playing like I did when I was at my friend's skill level.  When I wanted to play good again?  I just tuned back to the skillful frame of mind, and the rest fell into place!

This reminds me of something I heard referred to as "an old buddhist trick", though the accuracy is sketchy since I read it in a Dan Brown novel;  the character in the story used the trick of telling her self to Remember how to do something, though she had never known in the past.  She switched into the frame of mind of somebody that knew what they were doing, instead of her current frame of novice.

So, this is what I'm trying to do:  Slip out of the busy-bee-worker mindset, and into the student-who's-purpose-is-to-learn frame of mind.  I have to be careful not to simply slip into the "old" student frequency..the one that hated school.  I'm not that person any more, and i shouldn't let some person that doesn't exist influence my current frame of mind.  I'm developing a new "me", the self that is a student, the self with the history-of-self that is frustrated with contentment, that wants to grow, and that won't be happy with anything less.  Even though the flame may be "self" destruction, the moth of my ego doesn't accept anything colder than the heat.

And these are the themes of my life for the moment:  Self-definition, tuning into the frequency of the wanted self, growth, and the realization of the want For growth.  My mind tries to attach it's focus to old ideas, old situations, but I need to take the path of greater resistence, for the moment..  This isn't anything like anything I've ever found this self in...and it deserves it's own place, it's own definition, it's own room to grow.