#gratitudeNow:Really Good Noodling

A friend of mine, let's call him the UggaMugger, was lamenting to me this morning about it being the anniversary of his breakup with a Very Bad Ex What Did Gaslight Him Much.

U.M. said it was a bittersweet moment.  That in reading past journal entries, it was plain to him now how very badly he wanted to make things work, and how very much they did not, in fact, work at all.

I shared a thing about my own life that's similar.  I have some big relationships that I used to have, which I don't anymore.  One in particular used to be very painful to me.  This is with a family member who I've had a cataclysmic break with, over their intolerant attitudes, specifically around LGBT folks.

I shared this thing with U.M. about my experience, and theirs, that I want to hang on to, because I'm grateful I understand it.  Hence why I'm sharing it here, with you, dear reader.

There's this scene in the movie The Matrix, where Neo, newly freed from his unwitting imprisonment in the matrix, returns there with Morpheus and Trinity, to visit The Oracle.  As they travel in a car, they pass a noodle place he used to eat at.

Neo scoffs, because he loved the place, they had "really good noodles."  But now laments that none of that was real.

As I told my friend, this is poignant and related to us both.  Why?  

Because your experiences, your past, they’re yours.  They make you, you.  They’re not fake, not false, not to be thrown away.  You build upon them.  You can’t help but do it.

The path to this moment travels through all the moments prior to it.

That's a good thing.  Or it can be.

#gratitudeNow:Key toe

About 7 weeks ago, I started doing keto.  That's short for the ketogenic diet.

It's a high-fat, low-carb diet.  It means you stop eating refined sugar, grains, and starches.  Out with the french fries, candy, pizza, and such, which isn't surprising, and also with most fruit, which did surprise me.

In with meat.  Lots of meat.  And cheese, and eggs, and oh my bacon, so much bacon. And lots of veggies, just they have to be the right kind of veggies.  So broccoli and cauliflower are good, but you gotta not go crazy on the carrots or tomatoes, because they're high in carbs.

I know, I know.  It sounds sort of, well, bat-shit crazy.  

It's not though.  It's no fad either.  The diet's been around for over 30 years, has some good hard science behind it, too.  I've read up on it some.  Basically, you're doing a sort of body hack, that puts your body into ketosis, making it use fat for fuel, instead of carbohydrates.  

It reminds me of this scene from the Woody Allen movie Sleeper where Woody Allen's character, a health food restaurant owner named Miles Monroe, is brought out of suspended animation in the distant future.

Dr. Melik: Well, he's fully recovered, except for a few minor kinks.
Dr. Agon: Has he asked for anything special?
Dr. Melik: Yes, this morning for breakfast. He requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk.
Dr. Agon: [ laughs ] Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances...That some years ago Were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge?
Dr. Agon: Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
 

While I'm not eating hot fudge and cream pies, I sure do eat a lot of steak.  And it's working.  I'm down somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty pounds so far.

Plus, I'm coming to understand some of the subtleties.  This morning, I kind of made up a recipe, for a strawberry breakfast smoothie. (1/4 cup of heavy cream, 5 whole hulled strawberries, 2 packets truvia, about a half cup of ice, and add in water to reduce thickening.)

It was delightful.  

Some of the nice folks in the various online keto communities I frequent don't call keto a diet,  but refer to it as a Way of Eating.  (With the very unfortunate acronym WOE.)

That's ironic because I mostly am having no woe whatsoever.  

It feels great not just to be losing weight, but to feel like I understand not just what to do, but why and how.

#gratitudeNow: Elephant Algebra

So, I've been keeping this blog for several years now.  Along the way I've blogged daily, skipped it for days, even weeks at a time, sometimes caught it up, sometimes not.

I've gone looking for some one thing to be the "gratitude winner" of the day, holding it on a pedestal until some other thing ousted it from its prize place.  Alternatively, I've let myself be more loose and unstructured.

This morning, while home sick from work (because exhausted), I got into a long talk with my partner Alissa about it, and other things, and realized that I've reached a new plateau in my gratitude journaling practice.

I've reached the place that is no place at all.

The who what now?

Let me explain, by diverting altogether for a few moments.  As an author, and someone who writes code for a living, I'm very well aware of how ephemeral, fleeting, and elusive an idea is.  I'll be in the midst of talking to someone, or doing some other thing, when suddenly that code problem I was having becomes crystal clear, or an idea for an entire novel drops in my head, right there.

And if I don't write it down, or get some traction on it, right away, it just sprouts wings and flies away.

Often when that happens, I'll torture myself, in a vain attempt to get the idea back.  I even have a sort of funny mantra for it, something I tell myself, and often tell others when they find themselves in a similar situation.

"Don't think of a pink elephant."

That is, try hard to not think about a thing you weren't even thinking about in the first place.  It's the mental equivalent of looking for the car keys you dropped in the darkened movie theater, while still watching the movie.  A lot of the time it even works.  Your mental hand slips through the detritus of spilled popcorn and sticky unmentionables, moving in a direction you weren't even considering and VOILA! You stumble across the idea, or a piece of it.

Maybe.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it's still a shenpa, an expectation and attachment.  And whether you're successful or not, you've still been really unkind to yourself about the whatever-it-was that made you have the shenpa in the first place.

Today, just a bit ago while talking with Alissa, I realized that my entire 365 Gratitude practice had a flavor of that to it.

Because I have previously always been aiming at a sort of built construct, an end-goal.  "Hey look, I blogged every day, look how grateful I was!"  

But, and I say this lovingly, gently even, there's no there, there.  It's not just about the words left behind, the record.  Certainly, that part DOES matter, does help others.  But it's also about the practice itself.  

A HUGE part of the practice of gratitude has to do with what Buddhists call maitrī, or loving compassion for the self.  It's one of the three jewels of the Tao, too.  (The first one, 慈, t'zu.  I've written about it before.)

I am often so gentle and kind to others, while being terribly hard on myself.  This is not the first time I've seen this either.

What's different today though, is what I see I can do about it.  I can change my approach to this long exercise I have been doing for many years now.  I can keep the blog, keep writing in it, keep practicing my gratitude, but do so in the manner which also encourages me to pay attention to my self-compassion.  Not because there's some level of mastery to unlock, some achievement to note, but because just like eating, sleeping, and breathing, the practice of being good to myself is vital.  When?  Now.