#365Gratitude Day 297:One more

So there's this thing I've been doing since I was 13 years old. One morning, in the middle of the summer, when I woke up I felt the sunlight on my face, and the very first thing I thought to myself was this:

"Oh good, another one."

That is, another day to be alive.  Another day that I don't know how things are going to work out.  Maybe it'll be an amazing day, filled with joy and passion.  Maybe it will be a terrible day, that I'll be glad to see behind me when it's done.

I didn't have any remote idea just what sort of day it was going to be. But I was sure ready to find out.

The next day, I woke up. Same deal. And literally every single one after that.

I'm really not even sure why it started.  I can't even tell you the exact date. For my own convenience, and because I love my sister, I have set the date at her birthday, July 9th.

Going by that...

From and including: Monday, July 9, 1984

To and including: Sunday, October 23, 2016

Result: 11,795 days

It is 11,795 days from the start date to the end date, end date included

Or 32 years, 3 months, 15 days including the end date

It is, without exception the single longest enduring intentional practice of my life.

Of those 11,795 days some have been truly awful. There were days I was convinced that I wasn't going to be seeing the next day. There were days I didn't WANT to see it.

But each morning even after those sorts of days, I woke up feeling differently, feeling glad for the gift that is being alive.

Recently, my friend Matti has adopted the same practice. It's got me paying attention again to the value and power of this simple little thing I do.  We've been discussing it a lot, he and I, and I told him that maybe I'd make a hashtag out of it, start intentionally spreading it to others, encouraging folks to adopt the practice.

I can't decide between #ohgoodanotherone or maybe the more pithy and mysterious #OGAO.

(That last one reminds me of Oni Hartstein's #FDAU.  Go on, you ask her about it.)

What I do know is that I'm grateful for today. I'm grateful to be here. I'm grateful you read this, and that you're around too.

Time to go see exactly what this day has for me.

#dailyThink:It's more like a guideline really

This has been rather a sloppy sort of year for my blog. I started off not numbering, got spotty about posting daily, went back to numbering, still remained spotty.  

But I'm still here, and still blogging.  

There's a saying (usually misquoted as being said by Aristotle), that "We are what we repeatedly do."

I agree.  

I think part of that repetitive process is mindfully stepping back from it and adjusting it, the same way you aim a spray of water from a hose, or shoot a water gun.  

I go through something similar in my day job as a programmer. Try a thing, see if it works, adjust, try again.  Sometimes I will get something working, see an entirely better way to do it, and rebuild it. There's even a term for it, refactoring. 

I think adopting the practice of mindful refactoring has been, and continues to be a success strategy in my life.

• Try something.
• See how it works.
• Throw it out if it's not working for me.
• Keep going with it if I am happy with the results. 

Wash, rinse, repeat. Repeat until dead. You get the idea. This strategy is everywhere  in my life. I use it at work, at home, in relationships, my health, my finances.  

It's even inherent in my spirituality or philosophy. One of my favorite Lao-tzu quotes is "A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent upon their arrival." 

I do, ultimately, have a final destination. We all do. But how I get there, what road I travel, and what I do to enjoy the trip, that's what matters.  

#365Gratitude Day 277:A Cereal Love Story

So it's no secret that I, I should say, we, love Finding Nemo, and its sequel, Finding Dory.  A little while after we saw the new movie (which is stellar), Mommy got us a plushie baby Dory, Destiny the Whale Shark, and Bailey the Beluga Whale.

We were walking through Wal-Mart shopping for something else entirely when we saw Destiny, and with an almost audible pop, my littler self mako-kun came rushing to the surface.  He grabbed Destiny, and had this piteously needy expression on his face.  (My face?  Dissociation makes things confusing sometimes.)  Mommy not only got Destiny for him, but found those other two  right away.

A while goes by, and I forget where we first saw it, but we heard that there was actually Finding Dory cereal!  Mako-kun wanted this with the white hot fury of a thousand suns.  At first, I wasn't inclined to go get it, because sugared cereal, blah blah blah, grown up bullshit talk, etc etc.  

But it became like this thing with him.  Often when he and I are communicating, he "speaks" to me nonverbally, showing me a cascade of images one after another, or one image, very sharply.   That became, you guessed it, the box of Finding Dory cereal we saw on the internet.  It's a placeholder as a symbol for a bunch of different things, including:

• Stop.  Listen to me.
• This is serious.
• You're not paying attention to what I want/need/would really like to have since you love me so much.
• I don't ask for much.
• PLEASE

Along the way this little internal dialogue caught Mommy's notice, and my Auntie Squee's notice too.  This was not hard, because hints of it were everywhere.  

Yesterday I went out on errands, which included among other things, grocery shopping.  I went out of my way looking for the cereal, but couldn't find it.

I did get this other Krave cereal, which had a thing on it to get these Finding Dory points so you could save up and send away for a cool projection lamp.  But mako-kun was crushed.  I promised him the next time I went shopping I would go looking.

Then we came home, and found that MOMMY HAD ALREADY GOT SOME WHILE SHE WAS OUT TOO.  She found it at a Walgreen's.  We exercised restraint and didn't tear the box open.  Actually, it wasn't that hard, we wanted to really savor the cereal, really take our time.  So we waited until after I had got back from my run this morning, ad we could really eat it slowly, mindfully.

We opened the box.  We got out our favorite shark cereal bowl.  We carefully measured out a portion (1 cup of cereal, and 1/2 a cup of whole milk.)  We noticed the little Dory marshmallows (and Nemo ones too.)  We got a giggle or two out of "finding" Nemo and Dory, several times.  We realized that all of the makoish things there are to eat, and mako-kunish things, that this cereal is probably the most mako-kunish thing there is, hands down, ever, period.

Then we ate it.

OH MY GOODNESS IT IS GOOD.

We have the best Mommy in the whole world.

#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 Day 249:That's no accident

So Missy and I are traveling home from South Carolina, going up route 85. We're in Norlina, NC, right before the Virginia border when what ​didn't ​happen, ​almost ​happened. ​

​We're in a pack of cars, traveling at high speed through a one-lane "construction pipe", a temporary roadway made from jersey barriers. Somewhere several cars up the line from us, someone brakes hard, and it causes a cascade of braking all the way down the line. 

Missy slams on our brakes, with both feet. I hear the tires squeal, and mentally prepare myself for us to hit the car in front of us, and perhaps be hit by the cars behind us. ​

It's gonna be bad, I think. This is one of those multi-car monster crashes you hear about on the news. ​

​But miraculously we come to a full stop without impact in either direction. And the car behind us, a blue ​something​ comes rocketing past us on our right side. 

At the time we were on the phone with Squee, too. ​

The three of us collectively caught our breath.  ​

Bless her quick reactions and really very cute feet

A few minutes later we cross into Virginia.  

I commented to both of them how grateful I was that we didn't crash, didn't have an accident, and how I've frequently had nightmares about getting into one, or hearing Squee get into one, while we were on the phone. (We talk on the phone while driving a lot, because of our long distance relationship.)

We were all really shaken by it, all grateful too.  

Even days later though there's something about the whole incident and my gratitude that's stuck with me. It has to do with perspective.  

In that moment, the likelihood of a terrible  accident was  high.  I was grateful that things didn't work out the way they looked like they probably would. But there was (and still are) other ways to frame that.  

I am also simultaneously grateful that:

• My brakes work so well.  
• Missy has great reflexes.  
• The guy behind us managed to slip to the side.  
• No one was hurt.  

I see that I can see my expectations fall away  as well as my mindful attention to what is actually happening .  They're two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. 

Each moment I'm alive, there's an infinite number of things not happening, and an equally huge number of things that are.

I see that when I'm present, mindful, and open I have a limitless power to use that. Even now I have this awareness that I'm being constantly reborn into the present moment, constantly moving through an infinite sea of possibilities, outcomes, choices, and actions.  

It's magnificent.