#365Gratitude Day 2:Mount Mindful

There's this iPhone game I really like called Alto's Adventure.

In the game, you're a snowboarder in a remote mountain village, and you level by endlessly snowboarding, doing more and more complex tricks, jumping impossible canyons, and just endlessly going.

The controls are dead bang simple.  There's really only one.  You press on the screen at the right time, to jump, and the more you hold down your finger, the more you roll backwards to flip as you jump.

I bought the game when it first came out.  I rapidly got through the first 20 levels.

Then I spent about a year, stuck trying to get the last achievement to get past that level, landing two triple-backflips.

Once you've been playing the game for even a few minutes, you'll think, "TWO TRIPLE BACK FLIPS?! That's RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE.  What else do they want me to do? Divide by zero?"

But it is, in fact, possible.  I did it a few days ago.

Since then, I've bumped up several levels, until I got stuck again on something else.

"Survive through rain and snow in one run."

Doing a long enough run to move through snow and rain doesn't sound like a very hard goal.  But I kept flubbing it.  I'd travel through some rain, and then get all excited, and tense.  "Oh boy, I just gotta move through snow, and then I'm good."

Every single time I'd think this, I'd crash within the next minute or so, without fail.

Then I remembered what it was that got me past my triple-backflip problem.  I intentionally stopped caring about it.  I mean, it's not that I didn't want to progress.  Of course, I did.

But that was just my goal of the moment.  And once I owned it, and put it aside, I could just play, and be fully present for it.  I could enjoy the beautiful music, the lush views, and the really liberating sense of speed and travel that made me fall in love with the game in the first place.

That was when it struck me, that the entire game is a mindfulness exercise.

I started the game up, and told myself to enjoy it, and not focus on the outcome.

I beat the level.

Today, I used my day off to work on a side software project of mine.  I had Alto's Adventure on my mind all day.  I solved three maddening technical issues one after another, using the same sort of intentional disconnect I had used earlier in the game.  

I figured out for example, that when you use Datatables with Bootstrap that the order in which the CSS and JS files load on the page can have an effect on how the page is rendered.  I figured out a bad css call elsewhere on the page can compromise a call further down the page.  I did a code pull from the repository where I'm keeping the code, and figured out that something my business partner did was goofing me up, and was able to work around it.

When I wasn't worried about what had happened, or what would happen, but instead was focused on what was happening, I became so much more capable, so present.

There's a scene in the movie Peaceful Warrior that really speaks to this.  Dan, a gymnast and the spiritual student of the mysterious Socrates, meets him on a bridge near his college campus.  Dan's in a big hurry to get to the gym for something important, so he asks Socrates to take care of whatever-it-was that he called him to the bridge for, quickly.

And Socrates pushes him right off the bridge into the water.

After Dan confronts him angrily about what he did, and why, Socrates explains that he cleared his mind.  Then he tells him why that's good.  Here, watch.

I can tell you he's right.

#365Gratitude Day 1:It's a sweeter.

So I've had this sort of repetitive gag going for years.  

Every single time someone is getting a wrapped gift in front of me, I always say "Oh, I know what it is!"

And when, as inevitably they will, they ask, "Really? What?"  my answer is always the same.

"It's a sweater!"

I say this no matter what the wrapped package looks like.  It could be a tiny little thing you hold in your hand, a flat envelope, a giant TV-sized box.  Always the same answer.

Comedy gold, right?

You'd think this thing would get kind of old.  It does.  That's actually where the true comedy of the thing comes in.  Everyone who knows me well has heard me do this, ad infinitum.  People smile patiently, some cringe, some shake their heads.

One of my favorite Christmas presents of all time is this white sweater that our girl Rachel bought for me, then by hand "upgraded" to have a shark pattern needlepointed on it.  It's amazing, it's badass, I love it.

My friend Moliére and I are amongst the closest of friends.  We've been friends for several years now, and really consider one another family.  He recently learned about my sweater thing, and made it his own in this really (and literally) sweet way, when we were visiting him this past weekend.

Aren't these awesome?

After he gave them to me, I said that I wanted to have them with him, when he comes to visit us, down here.  I love sharing an inside joke, and love having such a close friend.  I love him lots.

#365Gratitude Day 365:My ~

So Moliére had this great idea: 

Step 1. Come visit him and Aiden up in New Jersey

Step 2. Get on a train, and go to New York City

Step 3. See the musical Matilda, before it closes for good the next day.  

Step 4. PROFIT! 

Seriously, what an amazing day with people I care about. Missy and Aiden took an instant like to one another, and we all had the most amazing day. 

#365Gratitude Day 364:Penguin Advice

"The miracle isn't that I finished.  The miracle is that I had the Courage to Start.  -John J. Bingham."

This is my favorite fridge magnet.  It's a quote by John Bingham, the runner also known as "The Penguin."

John used to be morbidly obese, a smoker, and in a lot of trouble health-wise.  He took up running, no matter that he was (and is) a very slow runner, and it changed his whole life.

He's called The Penguin because while in his head he feels like he looks like a gazelle when he runs, the reality is more that he looks like a waddling penguin.

John doesn't take himself too seriously.  He's great like that.

Anyhow, this magnet is a famous quote of his, and I find it inspiring in my life, over and over.

I have a lot of stuff going on in my life.  I have a demanding job, a rich and varied home life with a big polyamorous family, a podcast, a side business, the books I write, and just my life in general.

Sometimes it sounds exhausting when I read the list aloud to others.  But you know what?  It's great.  I love that I'm ambitious in my life, that I'm always moving towards more.

#365Gratitude Day 363:I once met a layout

So I'm in the process of doing a big refactor at work.  I'm totally overhauling the front-end of my project.

Refactoring, especially large scale refactoring, is kind of like spring cleaning.  You rearrange the furniture, find the stuff under the couch, dust in the corners, look for ways to do better the things you're already doing.

So, not that you asked, but you're reading my blog, so you kind of did, I stumbled across something big today.  Something I thought I understood about Grails, but actually only barely grasped.  It has to do with how Grails renders a page, using a layout for stuff that repeats across multiple web pages.

<html>
    <head>
        <title>An Example Page</title>
        <meta name="layout" content="main" />
    </head>
    <body>This is my content!</body>
</html>

That little boldfaced line of text up there, that's one of the ways Grails tells a page to use a layout.  But it's not the only way.  I won't bore you with the details, if you really want to know, you can read it for yourself over at the Grails documentation.  

The big thing I figured out was that there was this resource, this layout in the project that wasn't being used at all.  I figured out it wasn't being referenced in any of the ways it could be, and that I could refactor that sucker right out of the project altogether.

On my own, by myself.

Man, that feels good.