#365Gratitude Day 222: Dimensional Ingress

I love my iPhone. I haven't envied Android users anything, with one exception. 

Ingress 

It's a game, sort of.  It's like geocaching, crackpot conspiracy theory, and the us-vs-them game dynamic of World of Warcraft got put in a blender.  

There's an iOS version of the app now, and I got it two days ago.  

Today on my way home from Richard's birthday party campout I hunted down and took over my first interdimendional portal, at an abandoned workhouse, so that my faction, The Enlightened can help guide the efforts of the extradimensional  Shapers in bringing about a new age of peace in our world. 

Seriously. 

See?

I'm grateful that I get to participate in this compelling game of pretend that THOUSANDS of adults are contributing to.  

I'm also grateful that the efforts of The Resistance have proven unsuccessful at stopping us. ;-)

#365Gratitude Day 221: Richard

Richard is family to me. 

Tonight I'm at his birthday party. 

He's just lovely.  Over the years I have known him, we have taken care of each other.  He's often take-charge and responsible, and is generous with his time and effort. I count on him for common sense advice and help. 

At the same time, I take care of him too. He's kind of like my kid. 

Our relationship is complex and beautiful.   

I'm grateful for him. 

#365Gratitude Day 220: Mattering

Every so often I have this really surreal experience. Someone who's read one of my books or heard The Big Little Podcast will send me email thanking me for the work I do for and about ageplayers. 

I'm immensely grateful when this happens.  I take it as a sign, a validation, that I'm making a positive difference in the world.  

I remember back when I was first trying to wrap my head around being kinky, and felt so terribly lonely, and unsure of myself. It was an awful feeling. 

I know I can't stamp out that feeling universally, stop others from ever feeling it, but it's my constant desire to give people the tools to get through that and lift themselves out of that morass of doubt and pain.  

So when I hear from folks that that's so, it sure does feel good.  

But it can be a little weird.  I'm still a regular joe. I get up in the morning, scoop the cat litter, take a shower, and go to work.  I almost feel like the guy who gets those emails, he's not real. 

Sometimes people send me gifts, which is lovely, but makes me feel guilty, or occasionally, takes my breath away. 

Yesterday I got a spectacular gift from a listener, a musician who calls himself Comet Music.  He composed and recorded a song for me. This one. 

Give it a listen. It's lovely.  I'm grateful my work matters to kind, generous people like this.  

#365Gratitude Day 219: Simplicity & Detachment

Taoism is often paradoxical. It's extraordinarily simple, which makes understanding it incredibly complex.

A core idea in Taoism is its "three treasures", three virtues that when practiced bring peace, and power to your life. They are:

• Compassion
• Simplicity
• Humility

It's that second one, simplicity, or jian (pronounced chian) that's on my mind today.

Jian

A related idea that goes right along with jian is that of detachment. When I first began my studies about a decade ago, mindful detachment was a total mystery to me. I thought it meant apathy, or indifference. Not so at all. 

 Verse 7 of the Tao te Ching has some instruction on this. 

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

Detachment isn't not loving or caring about a thing. It's just the opposite. It's having identification with all things. It's not playing favorites. 

Let's say you go out to eat, and want the chicken. But they're out. You have the salmon instead. Because your needs are simple, just to eat, either choice is fine. You're detached from having to have the chicken. It's not that it doesn't matter.  It's that you are fine however it works out. 

When your needs are simple, you can fulfill them simply.  

That's it.  

It's taken me over a decade to work this out. I'm grateful for the experience and the knowledge. 

#dailyThink: The Two Most Important Questions

Ironically, I can't tell you exactly when or where I first learned them, but there are these two questions which are THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS IN THE UNIVERSE™

Typographic hyperbole aside, they really are the two most important questions anyone can, will, or has ever asked you.

I can ask you them, and conveniently you can ask yourself them, too.  Ready?  My only proviso is, please read them both before answering either. Then, when you do, answer both.  Here they are:

Where are you?  What time is it? 

I can hear you from here. "Really? That's it? I'm in the parking lot behind a plumbing supply shop.  It's 2:37am. Whatever."

I'll give you that they sound like simple questions.  Heck, they are simple questions. But their answers are profound, if you really think about them. 

Sure, plumbing supply store, 2:37am. Let's dig deeper. ​

Where is that plumbing supply store?  Let's pretend it's Rebuilding Exchange on Webster Avenue, in Chicago. ​

Where is that exactly?  ​

Sure, it's near thr water, not far from a Party City, but go BIGGER. 

It's in Chicago.  That's in Illinois.  That's in the United States. Keep going. North America.  Western Hemisphere. Earth. Solar System. Orion Arm of the Milky Way, in our galaxy, in the Universe. 

Right. Got it. Where exactly, is the Universe? 

You don't know. I don't either. 

Now let's try the time.  2:37am.  In comparison to what? Greenwich Mean Time, sure. Based on what?  Sure, there was a date and time we all agreed to use that as a standard, but that's not what I'm talking about. You know the date, and the time, and that it's 2000 some odd years since the putative birth of Christ.  But go bigger than that. How old is the universe before THAT supposedly happened?  Close to 14 billion years, apparently.  It's a large enough number to be functionally gibberish to you.  

Short answer: You don't know. 

Me neither. 

So let's try those questions again.  I ask myself these questions all the time. 

Where am I?  I'm here. ​

What time is it? It's now. ​

Here and now are the only definitive where and when I have. ​

Ok, so what?  ​

Well, the big deal about this moment in this place being the only moment and place you have is that it's liberating and empowering. ​

It's liberating because you're the end product of every single thing that's ever happened. All those things happened before you, before now. Invention of the wheel, colonization of North America, new math, and microwave popcorn​ all had to happen so that you could sit here eating corn chips and reading my blog.  

Alan Watts said that each person is a function of the whole universe the way each wave is a function of the whole ocean.  ​

So you don't have to bemoan things that have happened to you, nor celebrate them overmuch either. ​

You can however, be fully present for them. 

That's where the empowerment comes in.  When you are fully present in the moment, you can literally do anything, one thing at a time. If I decide I want to become a Portuguese fisherman, I can totally do it. 

• leave the office
• stop at the bank
• withdraw life savings
• stop at home for passport
• buy one way plane ticket to Portugal
• Get off plane.
• Travel to small fishing village
• Find kindly fisherman, convince him I want to learn from him
• And so on....

Furthermore I'm aware that whatever it is that's happening in this moment, it, like all things will pass.  We have no choice in this matter. We are all methodically and surely creeping toward death. 

Cheery, eh?  Actually, it really is. Nothing makes a sunrise quite so beautiful as knowing you will never see the exact same one again.  Next time you hug someone, or eat a piece of fruit, think about how each one of those is a unique experience that cannot be repeated.  

There's a funny thing that happens to you once you practice this sort of mindfulness.

Anyone that hangs out with me on a regular basis usually gets really frustrated with me because it seems like nothing bothers me. 

That's really not true at all.  I get frustrated, scared, angry, and irritated just as much as anyone else. 

But for the better part of a decade now, I've made a point of asking myself where I am, and what time it is. When I do and realize I don't know, it tends to blunt the sharp ends of those bad feelings.