#365Gratitude Day 58: Weasel training

Friday my friend Cargo Weasel came down from New York to visit me for the weekend.  It's a trip we had been planning for several months.  We were both looking forward to spending time together, and for my keeping him in diapers, and being cuddly buddies the whole weekend.

I drove to the train station where he was coming in, and waited.  As I did, I hung out in the tiny coffee shop at the station.  It was a riot.  The place was run by a very young manager, with help from some younger girls, who I think were related to him.  The three of them obviously really loved one another very much, and drove one another crazy, just as much.

I snuck a picture of them, artfully 'tooned up for artistic license and privacy reasons.

Shortly after I got a very nice cup of snooty coffee, Cargo arrived and I whisked him home to a bubble bath, and a weekend of time together.  It's the first time I've ever picked anyone up at that station, and it felt really right and good to do so.  I only even know about that particular station because I have travelled through it on my way to my old job.  I feel like it's something valuable I picked up along the way, that's stayed with me.

Anyhow, I was super excited to have Cargo down for the visit.  We've been good friends for years now, and the prospect of having his time to myself without the confines of an event, or podcast, or any other such goings-on was delightful.

#365Gratitude Day 57: Happy Valentine's Other Day

My sister-in-law Marybeth was away in Japan, visiting her new grandson, during Valentine's Day.  She got back afterward, and decided on a whim to celebrate it for me and Missy.  I got home from work to see this:

I'm lucky to be loved so much.

#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!