A better title might be “Forgetting what I came to Buddhism for”.
A love of meditation led me to explore Buddhism. I decided to keep exploring after learning that the central thing to do was to increase happiness by weakening/losing attachments.
It is easy to lose sight of that and I have done so often over the years. Buddhism and meditation are fascinating subjects.
Maybe the subject of weakening attachments doesn’t lend itself to conversations, at least not non-personal ones. “Keep trying to perfect sila, samadhi, and panna. Shower, rinse, and repeat” would be the standard, conversation killing reply.
When I come back into awareness of having lost sight of what I came for, I am impressed by “how much bang for the buck” focusing on that practice produces.
Currently for me that is “vipassana” as in trying to look at my thoughts & reactions as a detached scientist trying just collecting observations…and at least for me, when I notice a thought, taking a micromoment to emphasize remembering that I saw it.
I’m still impressed after all of these years that all of my automatic thoughts and reactions are the same ones, over and over again!
Ironically one of my recurring automatic thoughts is that " I CAN’T write down my automatic thoughts to deconstruct them! These automatic thoughts are endless!".
Um, hey Mr. subconscious, NO they are NOT. It is the same thoughts over and over again. A perfunctory amount of writing now, say 10 minutes, will not be lost, and will not expire. It can be built on later when that same thought, even in different words, happens again!