#gratitudeNow: That's Fitting

So part of my mindful practice is, well, practice. What I mean is there’s lots of time I am not mindful, catch myself at it, and gently steer back towards it.

I can be incredibly tough on myself, which often is not a good thing. And sometimes I fixate on things. I’ll have an unexpected something-or-other come up, good or bad, and firmly hook myself to it, riding off in an emotional swell of joy or despair.

My right sneaker, and the rainbow stripe sock I have on with it.

In the past day or so, I’ve done that a bunch of times. First I realized that our retirement savings are in even better shape than I’d realized. Cue joy upswing. Then I found out about a big car repair we have to do. Cue angry frustration. I made some progress on a challenging work problem. You guessed it - upswing. Realized potential issue with said work problem. And… down again.

Exhausting.

Okay, so what’s that have to do with my sneaker?

Well, it’s this. Part of mindful practice is making the conscious decision to stay present. Staying present doesn’t mean not feeling things. Just the opposite. You do feel them. You lean into them. To use a food metaphor, you don’t nibble or sip at the feeling you’re consuming. You take a big bite, a big gulp of it.

And then you swallow it, and take the next.

I woke up this morning with a bit of fatigue over my day yesterday, all that up and down. And as I was getting dressed, I decided to reach for my sneakers. I haven’t worn them in ages. That’s because of my lymphedema. I’ve become quite used to these shoes not fitting well at all anymore.

But, I’ve really become good about wearing my compression socks most days. I use my lymphedema pump at least once a week. So really, I’ve mostly got it under control.

Which is why when I went to get dressed, I decided to see if they fit well. When I first went to pull them on, I had a little anticipatory disappointment cued up. But I didn’t need it. They fit great!

Cue joy.

But this time around, I felt the joy (heck, and took a picture of my foot for this post), and then made the conscious decision to let it sort of slip out of my mental fingers.

Which, because it was deliberate, felt good, satisfying.

Embracing practice is a healthy thing.

This certainly wasn’t a unique experience. I’ve lost my practice before, and picked it back up again, countless times. I’m going to do it again, without doubt too.

Like my shoes this morning, that’s fitting.

#gratitudeNow: In which I read the grapefruit

So sometimes my daily contemplation sort of happens to me, instead of being something I go out of my way to do. Today it happened in my kitchen, a few minutes ago.

Red grapefruit, a couple of bowls, and a ridiculous amount of spoons, along with my trusty digital scale

I decided I wanted some red grapefruit along with the lovely poached egg breakfast sandwich I had made myself. So I get out this big plastic bottle of red grapefruit (not pictured), which had the dregs of the last of its contents, from my fridge. I put the bowl on the scale, and get my first spoon, the one I plan to eat said grapefruit with, out of a drawer, and begin scooping the grapefruit into the bowl, so I can weigh it.

This is so I can get an accurate calorie count, because I journal my food.

Well, this is a pain in the ass. So I decide to trade up to a big old ladle size spoon, to make the job go quicker. This is when the beginnings of my contemplation begin to form.

“Huh,” I think to myself, “part of being mindful is paying attention to how you’re doing things. Because the right eating spoon in this case is not the right serving spoon. I get those last bits of grapefruit into the bowl. It’s not nearly a satisfying amount of grapefruit. So I go grab the new smaller bottle of grapefruit from the fridge.

But of course, the big ladle size spoon doesn’t fit. So I set it aside, laughing. I get a larger-than-the-first-spoon size spoon out, and go to serve out some more grapefruit. Only to find that the bowl has sat on the scale too long, and NOW, it’s switched itself off.

Which means I need a second bowl to weigh empty, and pour the contents of the first bowl into. Ridiculous. But I do it.

So, now I’ve got my bowl of grapefruit. (157 g, if you care. Even if you don’t.)

I go to put the other bowl, the other spoons into the sink to wash them off, and return the grapefruit to the fridge. I zap the barcode of the new bottle, which finds the food in my app quite handily. Except in the app, there’s no setting for measuring in grams.

I begin to laugh.

Based on the estimate on the nutrition label, about serving size, calories, and yes grams of weight, I estimate that the portion I’ve spooned out is roughly .75 cups.

Close enough.

That was when the rest of the contemplation slid home, with a solid THUNK into my brain.

Here’s what I see about this whole silly endeavor:

First, that part of mindful practice is doing the best with what you have. Sometimes, that means you absolutely can tinker with the tools you use, the goals you have, the situation in front of you, to get the most optimal outcome.

But second, that even with all that bending and adapting, sometimes, you just arrive at a circumstance where you give it your best effort, and move on.

That’s not just true in measuring red grapefruit: I think that it’s true universally. It’s true in efforts, relationships, arguments. Because to do otherwise is to become mired in expectation.

Third though, is that no effort, no experience is wasted. Because who I am right now is in part informed by everything I’ve ever done before.

Maybe that means that the next time I spoon out grapefruit, I’ll just eyeball it, and call it good.

I’ll see when I get there.

#gratitudeNow: Cloudy with a chance of clear skies

So, a while back I wrote a post about a troublesome former friend of mine, Storm.

Not too long after I wrote the post, I bumped into Storm at a social event.

I gave them the most awkward of hugs, what I call a “mailbox hug”. That’s the sort of hug you give someone you are deeply uncomfortable with.

At the time, I didn’t bring up my feelings. It just was not appropriate.

But a few weeks later, their spouse, whom I’ll call Cloudy, reached out to me over the internet, and we had a conversation.

Cloudy asked me if I had a problem with Storm. And I said that yes, indeed I did. I said that while it was no secret that we had different politics, that wasn’t it. I explained that I have no place in my life for people who glory in cruelty, who enjoy being unkind to others and watching them suffer.

Cloudy said they understood. That it didn’t make them happy either. We ended our chat, and that was that.

Until a few months later, when I saw Cloudy expressing and condoning attitudes that agreed with Storm, and enabled them, really. I realized that Cloudy’s dislike for Storm’s attitudes was sort of hand waving, and enabling. And I made the choice to quietly not follow them on social media any more, or have them in my life.

Then… I saw them. We attended a multi-day event together. I nodded politely to both of them at various points. Then at one point, I actually ran into Cloudy, and we had a very awkward conversation.

At first, we spoke about trivial things. Life events, small talk, minutiae. At one point though, Cloudy asked me earnestly, “Have I offended you in some way?”

I shook my head, and offered to sit down for a few minutes and speak with them about things. I explained that in the past, since I’m a human being like anyone else, I had made the choice to give a pass to people who did some Very Bad Things™, because I liked their partner, and wanted to see them.

But I wasn’t comfortable with that anymore.

I explained that Storm’s attitudes and actions aren’t okay. Not even a little bit. And that while I understood that some terrible things had happened to them, that was not a pass to act so cruel, to enjoy others suffering.

Cloudy said that “I am not my spouse” and I agreed. But I said, there was simply no way for me to have Cloudy in my life without it being a tacit approval for Storm. I said that I don’t chase people, and that I don’t see that I have any right to ask anyone to change in any way. Not Storm, and not Cloudy for being with Storm.

I said that I didn’t mean to cause Cloudy any harm, that I didn’t want them to be sad, that the whole thing was unfortunate, but that things are just the way they are.

Cloudy cried. And said that they would stop bothering me then. And walked away from me.

I can’t say I’m happy about that. I understand that it’s a terrible thing to lose a friendship.

But I do have peace. I’m firm in my convictions. I’m grateful that I was able to be clear, and make as compassionate a break of it as I could.

#gratitudeNow: Silence

It’s really easy to get swept up in being busy. I’m in the middle of a very big weekend. I’ve got plans tonight for dinner as well as something social. Tomorrow I have coding to do, a virtual online lunch, and some dreaded chores.

It’s a lot. Also I’m dictating this blog post I am sitting in the parking lot of my gym, in my car before I go in to go swimming.

I decided to just take a moment to be in the moment. I turned off the audiobook I’ve been listening to. I turned off my car too.

And I sat, closed my eyes and listened to the silence. Except of course there isn’t any really. There is the sound of cars passing by on the road behind me. There’s also the sound of insects chirping and warbling in the forest behind the parking lot.

It’s a kind of meditation. I go looking for silence and don’t find any. Whenever I do this it always helps me to center myself. It helps me to connect with the truth which is that there is no place but here no time but now.

Recently I was telling a friend about my mindful practice. I talked about how it’s not something that you get better at, but rather something that you come back to over and over.

Every single time I do, i’m grateful for it.

#gratitudeNow: Thanks for Nothing

So stick with me here, because this one is a bit inscrutable. It’s Father’s Day as I write this. And what I feel about that is… nothing.

The symbol for nihilism.

Let me explain what I mean here. I guess the first place to start is my relationship with my own father. It was complex.

He was alternately a mythic hero, and a despicable villain in my life. He was largely absentee, often emotionally unavailable or abusive.

My dad was a sociopath and a narcissist. He was a very wealthy and successful businessman for much of my life. He was serially unfaithful to my mother, gaslit and emotionally blackmailed my entire family too. He embezzled an incredibly large amount of money from my grandparents family business, and faked having leukemia.

I know, horrible. Yet at one point I admired the man I thought he was.

All of this is Very Old News™️. He’s been dead at least a decade.

I saw a Facebook post from a friend earlier about his realization of what day it was, and how he was going to absent himself from social media because it hurt too much.

I feel that. Or rather, I did. There was a time in my life when I was so hurt, raw, and angry from the feelings of betrayal I had about my dad. I used to weep bitterly at this certain coffee commercial during Christmas.

But I am long past it. I think about the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, and I went through all of them.

Plus, some astounding good has come into my life because of the villainy of my dad.

Because of his machinations I am not encumbered by the yoke of guilt, secrecy, and shame many kinky people feel. I evaluate every emotional relationship I have on its own merit.

That in turn has helped me to help so many others to learn to love themselves, both inside the kink community, and elsewhere.

Which brings me back to today, to Now. Those old wounds have long since scabbed over and healed. They’re still not happy things for me, but in the context of my life, they have a place I’ve become comfortable with.

I’ve made them my own. I’m going to show this post to my friend and give him my heartfelt wish that he can work his way to a similar sort of peace.