#365Gratitude Day 272:Watts in a good article

Rascal, entertainer, and personal hero Alan Watts. His laughter sounds like music to me.  

It's no secret how much I love the written and spoken work of Alan Watts. Watts was a priest who studied eastern spirituality and philosophy and became a sort of "spiritual entertainer."  

Watts made it very clear he was no guru, he did not have all the answers for you.  Rather, he had a different way of seeing what it meant to be alive, a way you too might try to see.  The ideas he talked about were a mix of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and a distinctly modern sensibility.

His ideas, combined with the work of some others (Pema Chodron, Brené Brown, Dan Millman, Wayne Dyer, and Viktor Frankl) have changed and informed my whole life. 

My friend Manuel sent me a link to a 3,800 word article by Tim Lott about Watts, his life, and his work, Off-Beat Zen.  

I'm very grateful for it. It taught me some things about Watts that I didn't know, and expresses in a marvelously pithy way some of the very complex, powerful, transformative ideas I learned from his work and which are a part of my daily practice. 

#365Gratitude:Free Chillbo

Sometimes you luck out. ​

A while ago I brought in our old Keurig coffee podthing (sure it's a word) to work. ​

​This was after Missy got us a new one because the old one stopped working. 

Then it mysteriously started working again. Nobody needs TWO Keurigs. That's like needing two belly buttons. Nobody needs two of those either. I easily can accomplish all the belly button related things I do each day with my one belly button. ​

​So I brought it into the office and left it in the kitchen, for anyone to use. (The Keurig, not my belly button. I figured people would bring their own belly buttons. Besides, hygiene!)

My coworkers are lovely people who drink a LOT of coffee. So, they broke it, for good this time.

​But that's okay. Because the management at my company are super nice folks, and they got me an Amazon gift card to make it up to me. 

The hammock, not the woman in the floppy hat

​I used it to get two of these:

That's a sort of inflatable hammock called a CHILLBO BAGGINS.  ​I think they're neat.  There are a lot of different brands of these, but I had to go with the Chillbo, because after my extensive research, I found that this particular brand has the funniest name. 

And I got two of them. For nothing.  

Actually, when I really look at it, it wasn't for nothing. I kind of paid in mindfulness.  

Instead of being grumpy when the second Keurig purchase turned out to be needless, I decided to bring it in, sure for my own convenience, but also to do a nice thing for other folks, because why not do a nice thing when it's easy to do so? 

That's the essence of how karma works. It's not a tally board sort of thing. The word karma is actually Sanskrit for "action".  It's the ripples you make in the pond by throwing a stone. Good action tends to make more good action. 

I'm planning to give one of the two Chillbos I got to a friend as a present. Because it'll be nice, and why not be nice?