#365Gratitude Day 266: There's an app (and a movie) for that (and there isn't)

So I've been contemplating shenpa lately, because I've been listening to Pema Chödrön's fantastic lecture, Getting Unstuck.

Shenpa is a tibetan buddhist word that means "attachment."  It's the way in which we have a thought, and get hooked by that thought.  It drags us down, drags us away from the present moment.  That attachment comes in generally three varieties:

1. We get angry.
2. We go numb.
3. We cling to pleasure.

The problem isn't the thoughts themselves.  We are thinking beings.  It's the hook, the attachment that keeps us from staying present.  Instead we get stuck in our mind.  But we don't have to do that.  Or rather, we can mindfully unhook ourselves.

There's a scene from a favorite movie of mine, Peaceful Warrior that shows this happening.

A bit later on, Dan, that soggy looking, wet angry gymnast goes to the gym to tryouts for the pommel horse position on the team.  Fresh from his de-bridging, he takes a shower to prepare.  As the water pours down on him, he consciously unhooks this time.  The water slows down.  There are no thoughts.  He is fully present.  Then, without worry, without attachment, he performs his routine.  He's amazing. 

Yet still later, he goes back to visit Socrates (the guy who you just saw push him off the bridge), to celebrate his victory.  He's thrilled at the success he's had using Socrates' "mind trick."  Socrates chides him, telling him he's not learned anything.  "How long did you stay like that, Dan, clear?  You're already in the past, gloating."

I love the combination of these two things - Pema's lecture, and the lessons in these scenes.  It teaches me that attachment isn't always about negative things.  It can be positive things that hook you too.  Both keep you from staying, from having prajna, clear vision.

So what do you do about it?  You practice.  A great way to practice is to realize that you are playing a game.  Alan Watts called it The Game of Black and White in, The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.  In the game, we obsess about binaries.  "This is good.  That is bad.  Good must win."

We fill our lives with musts, shoulds, and wants.  All of which are, you guessed it, shenpa!  But you can notice yourself doing this, getting hooked, and not staying.  

Which brings me to the app.  It's called Bodhi Play.  I found it several years ago on the app store.  It's a sort of mindfulness tool.

It's got a yin-yang symbol hanging atop a zen sand garden.  Every time you catch yourself celebrating something, you tap the yang (white half).  Every time you catch yourself bemoaning or angry about something, you tap the yin (black half).  As the day goes on, you can see how often you got stuck, in each way.  You can see a bar graph for previous days, too.  You don't win the game.  You just play it.

It's a cute toy, with a lesson floating around it.  If you catch yourself thinking, you can unhook from it.  Pema's version of this is a visualization of touching a bubble with a feather, popping it.

Funny thing, just now I went to link to the app store to share where you can get the app, and I couldn't.  The original publisher of the software must have withdrawn it from the app store.  I got very upset about that for a bit, trying to find it, thinking I must have made a mistake, then searching for an alternative I could suggest to you instead.

Then I laughed, realizing that I was hooked, I was playing the game. Then I stopped playing.

#365Gratitude Day 265: No guilty pleasures

I have this good friend, Michael. He's geeky and nerdy in the best ways. He's constantly introducing me to new things to like, like Bee & Puppycat (a very strange and wonderful web cartoon), the game Portal, and lately certain seasons of Dr. Who.

The best thing he's introduced me to though is the concept that there is no such thing as a "guilty pleasure."  It's totally okay (and in fact great) to like things just because you like them , and no fandom opinion for or against something has any bearing on that feeling.  

I know! When I say it out loud, my overwhelming feeling is, "Um, duh! OF COURSE! "  But you'd be amazed how pervasive that feeling of "people will think this is stupid" can be.  I'm grateful that I know better and can get over myself about it.

I've got plenty of esoteric or downright odd things I love. I love Alan Watts lectures. I also love cat macros.  I even make my own, from pictures of my own cats, or ones I find that strike me funny. 

Here's one:

Cat poking his head out a hole in the side of an upside down box that's "flaps out."  Caption: "I am airplane. NO TOUCH LANDING GEAR!"

Dig that. Guilt free!

#365Gratitude Day 264: Opinion Laboratory

Learning and growth have been on my mind a lot lately.

Bear with me, this is going to be a long one.

So first, there was the two week period I spent learning my way around a particular technical problem at work.  

Second, while I'm generally left-leaning, I've been making efforts lately to understand the emotional position and feelings of more right-leaning conservative friends and relatives of mine.  

I'll admit that I see mostly right-leaning folks post things to social media that sometimes make me roll my eyes, or that make my blood boil a bit.

A whole bunch of stuff happened yesterday that came together in one big synthesis for me around both these things, about ten minutes ago.  

At work yesterday I spent the better part of the day observing two co-workers argue with each other.  Co-worker A is struggling to understand and do technical things he doesn't really know.  He's constantly asking co-worker B (and everyone else there too) for help, and cops an attitude about getting that help, and being asked to do things which aren't his job, and generally being a distracting, entitled, whiny pain-in-the-ass.  

It looked for a little while like Co-worker B was really getting bent out of shape about it, and going to kick Co-worker A right in his A.  Stressful! 

Later in the day I got to talk to my friend Magnus as I drove home from the gym.  Magnus is amazing.  He's in a constant state of learning.  In the 15 plus years I have known him he's evolved interests in electroluminescent wire, model race cars, poi spinning, biking, and geodesic domes, just to name a few things.  Like me, he's interested in paramotoring, and we waxed enthusiastically together over the phone about a plan for us to eventually do that together over and around the Burning Man festival, eventually.

Then I got into a lovely conversation with another dear friend, who I have known since college, my friend Scott.  Like me, Scott's often a big old lefty.  Like me, he's also very kinky.  Like me, he's also a super-talky-analytical-likes-to-sound-things-out-together sort of guy.  

So we did.

We got into an interesting discussion last night about how people (ourselves included) often confuse opinion and fact.

Avogadro's law is a good example of a fact.  (Avogadro's law states that, "equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, have the same number of molecules".)  

You can think that's great. You can think it sucks rocks. Doesn't matter. It's still true. That's a fact.

This morning as I was laying in bed, both these conversations and yesrerday's experiences were swirling through my head as I was surfing social media.  

I saw some more of that eye-rolling content, got annoyed, and then I saw two things that brought that train to a staggering halt.

First there was this photo:

It's two women, in their 60's and 70's who are pumped, in-shape and utterly, completely BADASS.  They started working out in their 40's and 50's respectively.

And then I saw this one:

An engineering illustration showing a shape that's both circular and rectangular, depending on which way you're looking at it, and the two holes it can fit in.  Each hole is labeled as "true", and the shape itself is labeled as "TRUTH"  At the very bottom is the message "PLEASE CONSIDER THIS BEFORE TALKING/TYPNG"

They rocked my world.  That first picture got me good because I have this unspoken bias I've been carrying around lately, an internal one.  I've been struggling to get back in shape and lose weight again, after yo-yo'ing back from losing around 50 pounds.  There's this tiny little lizard voice in my head that's been sitting on the brain couch, eating ice cream and french fries, and watching movies on its little brain tablet, while telling me, "Gosh Mako, since you're getting older, you're just not going to be able to get back into half-marathon running shape again." 

In a word: bullshit.

I recognize now, all at once, that that voice is just an opinion, and not even a well informed one. 

Similarly, being conservative or liberal on a given issue is an opinion.  Opinions can be informed by facts, but often aren't.  But they're a great way to be angry. It feels good to get angry.   

This is where my big synthesis comes in.  (Thanks for sticking with me this long.)

I don't have much use for getting angry, myself. It's my opinion (not a fact) that being angry is a form of fear, and maybe mindlessness (as opposed to mindfulness.)  "I'm dissatisfied that this situation is this way!" seems to be the essence of anger.  Perhaps even, "I'm complaining about being dissatisfied about this situation!" 

But dissatisfaction and complaints aren't action.  They don't do anything.  In fact, they implicitly are a statement of powerlessness.  "I can't do anything about this - I'm going to squawk really loudly until someone who can do something about it does it for me."  

I think it's perfectly natural to experience anger, to get frustrated.  But to stay that way, that's an act of will, a conscious turning-away from mindful detachment and compassion.

And it's optional.  

Which brings me back to my attempts to deal with my very frustrating co-worker, to empathize with my more right-leaning friends, and to get in shape.  I can see how my own opinions and biases are at work, affecting me.  In others, the very same thing is going on, inside their heads.  Part of why I can see my own struggle is because I can see theirs.

So now I feel like I have this new diagnostic tool.  When something ticks me off, I can ask myself, "Is that an opinion or a fact?" Once I've figure out which it is, I can then use it to my best advantage.

#365Gratitude Day 263: Work at a distance

So my friend Moliére is moving very, very far away, to Fiji!  It's around 19 hours by plane.  They're 16 hours ahead of me, clock-wise.

I'm excited for him.  It's an adventure!  Sad, too, because I'll miss him.  Now don't get me wrong, it's not like he and I see each other every day.  He used to live several states away anyhow, and recently changed that to several more states than before.  

But moving to the other side of the planet, that's a different thing altogether.

But he and I had a long talk yesterday, and decided to do something about it.  He's going to help me with a side project I've wanted to make for about 15 years now, a kind of online behavior management tool for age players.  I've vacillated about working on this thing for ages, but yesterday we spent several hours chatting and writing down real world ideas for how it should work.  I'm excited by the prospect of our working together on this thing for a number of reasons:

• It's going to finally help me get off my butt to get it really built.
• Moliére, who is a genius, had several ideas I hadn't thought of that could make this thing go from a good idea to a truly great one.
• It gives us something tangible to do together, even separated by thousands of miles of distance.

I'm excited by this!

#365Gratitude Day 262: iDoctor

On Saturday I went for an overdue visit to the eye doctor.  It's been about a year for me, I was running out of the disposable contact lenses I wear, needed new glasses, too.  (I throw my lenses out monthly.  I also don't sleep in them.  Kindly shut your face about that, thanks.)

I did get the briefest of scares during my appointment.  After everything was done, the doctor called me back to "have a discussion."  That never bodes well, and felt like being called into the principal's office.  

Turns out it wasn't anything terrible though.  I've got this little spot, a birthmark sort of thing on the back of my eye.  It's benign, thank goodness, but bears watching.  Conveniently, because it's in the back of my eye the only way it's getting any watching is with that additional $36 worth of photographs each year at my eye exam.

Having a birthmark on the back of your eye is a bit like that being that guy from Mystery Men who can turn invisible, but only when no one is watching him.  

I don't care even a bit though.  I'm glad it's nothing.  My vision is super important to me.