#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: 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: The heights

So I’m a busy guy.

This morning I was cleaning the kitchen, as Missy tasked me to do before work. (Task is an interesting word in this case. She told me to do it, while asking, so even though it’s not really a portmanteau, I’m treating it that way.).

As someone who is very goal-driven, who loves serving his dominant wife, and who craves the simplicity of being tasked, this worked out well for me.

I did in fact, get the kitchen cleaned.

So I grabbed my phone, and I wrote it down in WeMinder, and even snapped a photo and texted it to her.

She was pleased.

I however, was not.

Because as I was entering the good behavior into WeMinder, I noticed something wasn’t right with the look and feel of the screen.

After a bit of thought, it came to me. The height of the card wasn’t right, when the “behavior chip” of my 1 new good behavior was showing on the card.

It pushed everything down, making my brand new bottom navigation icons push too far down.

So I sat and reasoned it out for a few minutes.

I realized that a good fix for this problem was to reduce the height of the behavior list from “40vh” down to 25, 30, or 35vh respectively depending on if I were showing 1, 2, or no chips whatsoever.

Without getting too deep into the weeds of technical details, I figured out exactly how to do that, and got a hot fix ready, tested it, and deployed it into production in WeMinder.

It’s out there now, working just fine. I know, I checked just before I started writing this post.

But this post isn’t really about viewport-height. It’s about the heights of owning my own business, while also having a full-time job, while also serving my wife, while also being polyamorous, while also… the many other things I do.

It’s often really challenging. I have a lot going on in my life.

But honestly, that’s a blessing. My mind is pretty sharp. As long as I take good care of myself, I can maintain and even increase that sharpness.

This means I need to get decent sleep, allow myself rest, maintain good boundaries by often saying no to the things I can’t do, and practice copious amounts of self-compassion.

By and large, I really do, do that.

I’m 50 years old, and while sometimes that seems like a lot, it really isn’t.

I feel wonderfully in touch with who and what and where I am. I like the me I am, and the way I’m stretching myself to be more.

It feels good.

#gratitudeNow: The Reboot

This morning I rebooted several things. The kitchen desperately needed attention, so I did that. The cats’ litterbox drawer was full, so I emptied it, and wiped it down with some special wipes. I started tracking my calories again in earnest, too. I started tweeting again, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I caught up on a few episodes of Love in Brief (One of my favorite ageplay podcasts.)

And I rebooted… me.

Which I do each day, but sometimes with very careful deliberate action. I was talking to my brother Spacey last night, as I usually do most Tuesdays. We were talking about health things, and life in general.

And it got me thinking about What I Am Doing™, just my life in general. There’s a lot going on that I’m really quite happy with. But some things I’m not. The pandemic hasn’t been great for my health, specifically my waistline. I heard someone jokingly refer to pandemic weight gain as the “Covid 19.”

It’s not inaccurate.

I talked to my wife/mommy/bestest-friend-ever Missy about it last night too. And agreed that today is a new day, and I’d be starting fresh.

So this morning I carefully recorded my calories, using an app. That sort of journaling and staying under my caloric budget, combined with regular exercise has consistently worked for me before. I’m at it again.

I’m just a person, like anyone else, so I often lose sight of my mindful practice. I’ll get bogged down in regret, or worry about the future. But the awesome thing is that just like, say, cleaning the kitchen, or dumping out the cat’s litter, that departure-from-mindfulness can be undone, with a mental snap of my fingers.

Being in the moment, fully embracing it is a simple, profound, powerful act. I forget it often, and I’m always utterly gobsmacked by how good it is when I find it again.