#365Gratitude Day 56: Being Loose as a Goose

Last week I drove to work the last few days of my old job.  It was just too darn cold to take the train, and I wanted to clean my desk out, and have time to do it thoroughly.  So instead of taking the train, I got in the car.  I also put on a new audiobook, Pema Chödrön's Getting Unstuck.

It's an audio lecture she gave, about the Buddhist concept of shenpa, the process of becoming hooked (like a fish) because of attachment.  Something happens that we don't like, that hurts us, and we react to it.  

In the lecture, Pema said that there are three ways generally we get hooked:

1. We get angry.  "How dare that person speak to me that way?" 
2. We go numb.  "I'm just gonna shut down and not feel this terrible fear." (Or anything else for that matter)
3. We seek pleasure.  "I'll just eat this big plate of french fries, or stare at porn for a few hours.  That's better than thinking about this terrible thing."

When we do any of these behaviors, we're not present, not with the world anymore.  We're hooked, and have left the world behind.  Our eyes cloud over, our body language changes.  We're stuck,

The good news is we don't have to be.  Getting unstuck isn't the process of not feeling the pain (just the opposite).  It's instead gently allowing that it's so.  We can gently touch the thoughts we're having, and acknowledge that they are just thoughts.  We can focus on our breathing, a constant in our lives.  

It doesn't make the bad feelings go away - it makes the thoughts around them unclench, fade.  Then we can just feel the energy of our shenpa, and be with it.  Then instead of stoking the fire, feeding it, it gradually fades into the background.  The painful experience, memory, fear, or idea isn't gone - it's just one more of the countless number of experiences which are a part of us.  The further away we get from it, the quieter its loud voice becomes.  It doesn't disappear.  We don't run from it.  We just build upon it.

Amazing stuff.

So I listened to about half of the three and half hour lecture on my way in to work.  Right away, I felt good.  Those last few days at the old job were such an odd time.  I had very little to do, just a few short projects.  The time had been passing torturously slowly before.  But after I was newly armed with my knowledge of shenpa, I could tell when I was hooked, and spent the day gently getting off that hook.  

When I left at the end of the day, I felt calm, easy.  Instead of stuck I felt limber, loose.  

On my way home, I finished the lecture.  It's been moving through my head for days now.  I'm so grateful for that time, and the opportunity to process such a giant idea, as I make a giant change of my own.

#365Gratitude Day 55: A fan in/from Japan

My nephew A. is married to a lovely Japanese girl, T., who he met in college.  She was an exchange student.  They fell in love, got married, and he moved to Japan.  They recently had a baby too.  He's completely adorable.  

My sister in law, Marybeth recently went to Japan to visit, meet and spend time with her new grandson.  She just got back from there, and brought Missy and I all sorts of lovely gifts.  The one which most took my breath away is this:

The painting on that fan is my all time favorite piece of art, Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.  I have always loved it.  It speaks to me in so many ways.  Marybeth, and all my Japanese relatives scoured shops in Kyoto to find me this fan.  

That blows me away.  I've met T. several times, and met her whole family when they came to America for their wedding.  They're lovely people.  I know in the years to come we will become close.  But for now, they're intimate strangers to me - people I'm just getting to know.  It's so incredibly thoughtful that they would take time during their visit with Marybeth to look for this thing, for me.

There's a great truth peeking out from inside this happy little story.  People matter to each other.  We're all connected, in mysterious, ineffable ways.  Life's like this enormous tapestry, in which every single person is one thread.  As we live that thread grows, lengthens, wraps around, over, under other threads, binding and connecting them.  Together, our lives form a beautiful work of art, a magnificent totality.

I'm grateful for the threads that touch my own.  

#365Gratitude Day 54: Mistakes aren't terminal

I've been struggling with a code problem with a side project for over a week now.  Yesterday I met up with an old friend, C. for coffee and to get his help looking at the code problem. 

We got together at a Panera, booted up our laptops, and banged away at the problem. After 90 minutes of trying different things, and a whole lot of cussing and research, we found the problem.

If you really want to know the issue, the Grails framework has different modes of operation.  When I pushed coded up to the repository for my application host, the application was in production mode, and trying to update databases that didn't exist.  I had to change the mode to create and drop the tables each time the application came up.

See I told you you wouldn't care.

But anyhow, the point of all this is that:

a) I'm grateful my friend helped me.

b) mistakes are often how you learn things.  Now I know how to fix that problem.

Next!

#365Gratitude Day 53: Trading Up

Many years ago I was by myself during a terrible blizzard.  I lived alone, and recently broken up.  I was the sort of single person who is somewhat dreadfully unprepared to be a single person.

Case in point, when the storm hit I had almost no food in the house.​  I decided that I would dig my car out and go get some.

The problem was that I didn't have a snow shovel. When I did have was a plastic snack tray, the kind of tray that you carry your food on in a fast food restaurant​.

So I dug out, using that tray. I'm not kidding when I say it took me hours to do it, at least two, maybe closer to three.​

I remember that I cried a few times as I did it.  ​When I finally got to the grocery store, all they had was Tostitos pizza rolls, Eggrolls, and french fries.  Oh and grape soda too.  I bought it, all of it. It was what they had.  Not my best day ever. 

So, cut to many years later​, just a few days ago, we got another big snow storm.  We had plenty of food In the house, but somehow alarmingly no snow shovel.  I borrowed a neighbor's to dig out. 

Yesterday, I knew a bad snowstorm was coming again​.  Missy and I got out early, ran errands, had a great breakfast, went grocery shopping for real food, and stopped at Home Depot, where I bought this:

As you can see, it already got use.

I'm really really grateful for bad memories.  I'm not even sure you can really call them bad memories.  I've told that snack tray story a lot over the years.  Sometimes I really laugh when I tell it.  Sometimes, not. 

The thing that strikes me about this whole situation is that past experiences are what you build on. Without a starting point, I can't make any progress.  I needed to have that snack tray so I can trade it in for a shovel. 

#365Gratitude Day 52: Options

Friday morning it was cold, I was tired, and there were about a dozen things I wanted to do more than stand on a cold train platform to go to my old job.  

As it turned out that wasn't gonna happen anyhow. Those red dots are delayed trains up and down the entire line.  

So, I got in my car instead. My nice warm car, where I could spend my whole commute talking to my brother on the phone.  

It's good to have options.