#365Gratitude Day 362:CWRF

That's short for:

Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly

It's something I say often, and an attitude I practice, although I forget it sometimes, and have to remind myself about it.

In anything I do, I have to start somewhere.  Eventually I build on that somewhere, and go from new, shaky, awkward, and limited to gradually being more capable, until I reach a point of excellence.

It occurred to me this morning that I practice CWRF all over the place.  I practice it in my health, with how I eat, and exercise.  I practice it in my work, as I constantly am teaching myself how to do things, and refining things I've already done to work better.  I practice it in my polyamory, my writing, everywhere!

I suppose another way to state the truth of CWRF is There's always improvement that can be made.  You have to be careful there though, because that can sound negative, and perfectionist.  That's not it though.  It's not "This isn't good enough yet." but rather, "Awesome!  What can I do next?"  It's the forward movement that matters, not the milestone.

And the thing is, each of these stages is great in its own right.  When I'm in "crawl" on something, I get to move at my own pace, explore, make mistakes, and find value in the discovery.  There's something great about being in that newborn state, gently poking and exploring and figuring out not just what I'm doing, but what potential every choice even has.

Then when I move up to "walk", I trust some of what I have already done, and begin to build upon it.  For example, in writing I'll have demonstrated some aspect of a character's motivation previously, and now can artfully weave in the barest nod to it, almost like a background detail, and suddenly the reader knows them better.  Or in my coding, I'll take some long-handed way to do something, and refactor it to be simpler, more elegant.

When I get to "run" on something, I have great trust in myself, and I'm using what's worked for me in the past to really book it, get great chunks of productivity accomplished.  I love being in the run state.  

Eventually I get to "fly", which in its own way is eerily reminiscent of "crawl", because now I can really let my imagination go, and explore anything and everything, but now with a set of tools and competency supporting me.  I know my patterns and habits over a thing, and can rely upon them.

There's so much that goes into this paradigm, that's part of the recipe for using it:

• Mindful attention to the moment
• The Taoist concept of the soft overcomes the hard, like how rainwater carves valleys
• The Taoist concept of 'u, the un-carved block, inside every block of wood is the potential to be anything.
• Maitri, the Tibetan Buddhist concept of loving-kindness for oneself
• Shenpa, the Tibetan Buddhist concept of attachment.  By staying present, you transcend shenpa, to move forward.

I'm so grateful that I practice this, so grateful I can fall back to crawling in any aspect of my life, and know that there's value there.  

There's a Lao-tzu quote I really love, which I have just gained new insight about.  It goes like this:

If you do not change direction, you may wind up where you are heading.

When I first learned it, I used to take it as a gentle rebuke for being too obsessed with an end goal.  But I've since come to see while that's true, it's simultaneously an encouragement to move forward.

Time to get moving again.

#365Gratitude Day 342:Good for me? Good for you!

I keep bumping into examples today where advice I give other people is also good for me, and vice versa.  

First, this morning, on Unnamed Social Media Site, a friend of mine lamented about how she struggles to do everything she has to do in life, and can't seem to find time to even rest. 

I told her she was being way too hard on herself , and suggested that if she makes her own well-being a priority, maybe she would feel less overwhelmed. 

Cue irony in 3, 2, 1...  

I was telling my girlfriend Squee all about this, as I was driving to work this morning.  This was after the very good, very long day I had yesterday, when I got up around 4:30 in the morning, spent several hours coding at my side project, went to work, fought rain and traffic in a torturous commute, wolfed down way too much dinner, then proceeded to work until late on the side project again, then tossed and turned all night, still thinking of said side project.  This resulted in me: having trouble getting up, missing out on work on the project, missing out on going to the gym. 

By trying to do everything, I wound up not able to do much anything, beyond the minimums my day required of me today. 

But, giving my friend advice to be gentle to herself, combined with Squee's careful eye upon me, helps me see that what's good for others is also vital for me, too.  I need sleep.  I need to eat right.  I need to work out, and take care of myself, physically.  Bouncing back and forth between awesome supercapable day and terrible burnout day is no way to live. 

So, it's getting on towards the end of my work day, when I get an email from a podcast listener, as follows: 

Subject: Mindfulness

Hey!

I am working on practicing mindfulness as a way of decreasing anxiety. What's the phrase that you say on many of the podcast episodes? Something like "Where am I? What am I doing?"

Thanks,

**redacted listener**

So, here's what I told them.

Hiya!

You're talking about The Two Most Important Questions in the Universe™. They are:
"Where are you?"
And
"What time is it?"

The answers being that:
You are here.
It is now.

Which are actually the only time and place you can be, although we frequently lie to ourselves and pretend otherwise.

Thanks!
--mako

That's some damn good advice.   It's funny how as I give it to someone else, I'm kind of re-giving it to myself, all over again.  Sometimes I lament, for comic effect, what a pain in the ass the universe is, my ever-present, always-giving, provider-of-lessons.  And while sometimes the way these things jump out at me really is annoying, mostly it's a blessing that I'm grateful for every single time it happens.

So, I'm going to go home now, and take back roads, drive slowly, and listen to an audiobook I am enjoying.  Then I'm going to relax, and go to bed on-time for a healthy bed time.

#365Gratitude Day 336:Let me slip into something more discomfortable

So, as a morning person, I do a lot of thinking in the morning.  And this morning I got myself into a good old tailspin of some negative thinking.

The particular what's, why's, and wherefores of said thinking don't really even matter. And, they're private.  But a really good thing just happened to me around said bout of badthink.

A good friend approached me offering to lend support, and I sort of judo flipped the offer. I didn't want to discuss the churn in my head.  But I did value their support, and said so. 

Here's exactly how that went down.

My Friend: "Good Morning Mako"
Me: "Morning!"
My Friend: "How are you?"
Me: "So-so.  Just have a lot on my mind."
My Friend: "Do you want to talk about it?"
Me: "No, but thanks.  Hugs."
My Friend: "Hugs."

Funny thing.  As soon as we had had the exchange, I started to feel better.  Then it struck me why, exactly.  It's not a simple why.

Over the course of my many years of meditation and contemplation, I've stumbled across several ideas, several practices, which I find transformative, helpful, and healthy in my life.  

One is being mindful, staying present.  That means being in the moment, even if the moment doesn't feel very good.  You feel in totality what you're feeling.  Then, you feel the next thing.  I had been all caught amidst a bunch of expectations, frustrations, fears, and judgments.  But when my friend messaged me, I was beginning to feel something different: supported, loved, cared for.  I started to feel better in part because I was moving on to the next thing.

Another has to do with some instruction I learned from Pema Chödrön.  It's a meditative practice called leaning into pain.  You take the thing you're looking at, that bothers you, and really focus on it.  If it's a fear about the future, you follow it down the rabbit hole to its potential ultimate conclusion.  If it's a lament about circumstance, or past pain, you look it full in the face, and see what that circumstance really means.  

It's a rewarding but challenging sort of thing to lean into one's pain.  What tends to happen is that whatever-it-is that's so painful to you gets its teeth blunted.  It's not that there's no bite there, but that the pain stops being front-and-center and all consuming, and recedes into a more manageable place.  A mistake you have made becomes just one among thousands you have already, and may yet make.  

Being mistreated by another person gains context.  It's not that you forgive them, or that it doesn't hurt.  But you see that they, just like you, are fragile and imperfect.  

The thing causing you pain still causes it.  But you begin to see that the pain is transient, fleeting, like every single thing in your life, including your entire life.

Third, and this was maybe the key thing, I saw that I was okay with not being okay.  I wasn't running from my discomfort.  I was staying, sitting with it, moving through it.  That's samsara, the "wheel of suffering", from Buddhism.  Often we expend more energy trying not to suffer than the cost of just experiencing the suffering in the first place.  I didn't want to rehash my negative thinking with my friend because it had already happened, and I didn't need to run from it, just through it. 

That actually felt good to see.  Now, about an hour later, I can barely remember the thoughts which were so hot and painful just a little while ago.

I do this sort of processing, moving through things, all the time.  But it's rare that I take the time to mindfully detach from it, and watch it.  I've spent 12 years acquiring and honing these skills, and each time I use them, it's still work, still a practice.  I'm going to be doing this same sort of meditation and contemplation for the rest of my life.  That's inherent to the very nature of the practice - it's not work you start, or stop.  It's work you do.

I'm thankful for it.

#365Gratitude Day 335:Bob McGrath owed me a damn apology.

 Well, not just me. He owed lots of kids an apology, starting with Big Bird.  Bob was one of the grownups on Sesame Street, and Big Bird was kind of the big, yellow, avian stand in for every kid. 

Some history here: when I was a little kid, I didn't find the way no one ever believed Big Bird about Snuffleupagus very funny at all.  In fact, I can remember being six or seven years old, and flying into an apoplectic rage every time one of these moments would happen.

Every time, I would feel bad for Big Bird because his friend made him look stupid. And all the grownups would dismiss him.  It felt callous, cruel, and awful to me.

Today, I stumbled across an article about why the Children's Television Workshop decided to change this, which was for a damn good reason. At the time there was a rising epidemic of child abuse at day care centers, and the producers felt that the joke of no adult ever believing Bird was not only no longer funny, but actually possibly dangerous.

So they did something about it.

I had long past graduated away from watching Sesame Street at the time, so while I heard about this I had never seen it before.

Until today.

I'm not ashamed to admit that even now, at 45 years old, as I watched, when it looked like it was happening all over again, I teared up.

And then it finally happened.  I'm going to say too, that I have never liked Phil Donahue or Elmo more.  I honestly have always found Elmo to be kind of an annoying little git. But not anymore.

See for yourself. 

#365Gratitude Day 314:The sweet embrace of the unknown

So, yeah.  President Trump.  I'm one of a very large number of people this morning who feel "like I was thrown into a dumpster from a moving car being driven by a giraffe high on PCP."

Sometimes, we all have that moment where we're walking through the house, in the dark, in the middle of the night, and we bang our toe against something.  It hurts.  And for a moment, we sit down and grab our toe, and worry that perhaps this time, it's not just sore, but maybe broken.

And maybe for a little while we wear shoes in the house, or decide that maybe we don't need that fig newton and slug of milk right from the carton in the fridge in the middle of the night.  (Hey, it's my house.  Don't judge.)

And we keep going.

That's the whole point of this blog.  We don't start anything.  We don't stop anything.  We just keep doing.

There's a zen story about it that's my favorite.

This one.

Let's keep going.