#365Gratitude Day 177: Shoshin Splints

Shoshin is the zen buddhist concept of "Beginner's Mind."  It's the conscious approach to learning and experience, no matter what your level of expertise, as if you were just getting started.  It's valuable for a lot of reasons.  

When you're an expert, you tend to do things in the tried-and-true, tested way you've always done them.  When you're a beginner, you take chances, get messy, go for the weird options.

As a taoist, and an age player, I find this immensely appealing.  

I've not been running for a long time.  Recently, I've been wanting to get back to it.  I've had a lot of expectation, regret, fitness loss, and lack-of-motivation in my way.

This morning, I said, "Well, fuck that."  I got out my running gear, and went for it.  It was just a walk really, albeit a rather fast paced one.

I'm actually pretty happy with this - 17:08/mile average pace, 651 calories.  I've done worse.

I set out with no expectations.  I ran for exactly 30 seconds, and that was just to get across a busy street.  But I walked quickly, and with purpose, up and down some hills, too.  

It was just a beginning.  But beginnings are great.  Where can I go from here? 

ANYWHERE.

#365Gratitude Day 176: I've got it to give

I've got this really good friend.  She's going through something particularly shitty.  I won't say who it is, or what, because that's not for me to do.  Right after I got home from my class today, I got a text from her.  She was in a bad way.

I called her.  We talked, for a long time.

Afterwards, she felt better.  It was not the problem-solved-everything's-great sort of better (which is usually not real anyhow) but the I-can-deal-and-I've-got-my-head-on-differently-now sort of better.

I'm glad for it, too.

I was pretty wiped after my class.  I felt exhausted.  Enough that I decided to skip the gym to come home.  But when my friend texted me, I was instantly on the case.  I suddenly had new energy to spend, to help her.  It surprised me, really.  

Other people's suffering calls to me.  Especially people I like.  The more I like you, the less I can stand your being in pain.  

I don't know why I'm like this.  Heck, maybe everyone is.  I'm just glad I am.  It feels good to me that when people need me, I can be there for them.  I like helping people to blunt the hard edges of their lives.

#365Gratitude Day 175: training day

Yesterday was my first day of a training class.  

It was a particularly good day.  

1) My other three co-workers and I were early to the class, and got the best seats.

2) We've been working with the software product we're learning for a little while, making us sort of the class leaders.  We got through a lot of material that the rest of the class was still struggling with.

3) Because of this, we got to leave for lunch before everyone else, and go for a nice long lunch, to boot.

4) When we got back, I found out there was a really nice branch of my gym right near the training site, and I had packed my gym bag just in case that was so, and thus got to go swimming right after class!

Sometimes, you just have a really good day.

#365Gratitude Day 174: In which I have experiences which build my � character!

So a colleague at work asked me to build something for him - an export tool that outputs data from my project, but in a much simpler, more abbreviated format.  It would have only two columns of data, instead of the dozen or so the existing tool does, have no header row, and would strip out any quotation marks in the comma separated value file (CSV) it would generate.

No problem.

I read up on the particular plugin we were using to do the existing export, including this not very helpful piece of documentation.

It reads like it should be written u\0000, right?

Nope.  It's \u0000, which is NULL. (That's its format in java and groovy.)

After just a little bit of stupid puttering around, I figured that out on my own.

I'm grateful, if not a wee bit frustrated!

#365Gratitude Day 173: Sick and tired

Sunday night we got in around 9pm. I was that horrible mix of jacked and exhausted.  

Exhausted from a 9 hour trip in the car (including traffic around the Verrazano bridge and a stop for Tony Soprano's pizza (cheese, with mushrooms) in New Jersey)

Jacked from being home. I had this minecraft project of mine on my mind, and proceeded to stay up until 2am working on it with a friend.  

Yeah, stupid.  

The next day I managed to get myself up for work, drove in, started reading my email and realized I was bonking.  

This is the icon for work bonking.  

Thank goodness for understanding bosses and sick days. I got the heck out of their and went home for a extra large sized nap (no cheese, no mushrooms)