#365Gratitude Day 315: A great talk makes for a great day

I'm sort of an addict.

I'm addicted to other people's happiness.  I love helping people explore their own potential practice of mindful self-love and self-acceptance.  It feels so good to help people to teach themselves gratitude.

So, yesterday.  I'm in the car, driving to work, and my phone rings.  It's my friend William.  He's been going through some Serious Shit™ lately.  I am not going to get into the exact nature of the serious shit, because this is my blog, not his, and I didn't ask him if I could share it with you.

But it's been going on a while.  And William, who is awesome, has embraced all the ideas and philosophies of mindfulness I've exposed him to.  He fucking loves Pema Chödrön.  We hadn't talked on the phone in a while, and he has some awareness of my patterns, and knew I'd be in the car, so... ring ring!

We had this fantastic talk, about our lives, his serious shit, some of my own serious shit, how little control we have over anything at all, and how utterly, almost painfully beautiful that makes our lives.

If phone-calls-during-commutes were fancy restaurants, this one would be a five star one in the Michelin Guide.  It was epic.

And we both thought so.

#justBecause I'm going to need your patience everyone....

While I proceed to utterly and completely go bonkers about something I've been looking forward to for a very long time.  

In June,  Finding Dory  is coming out!!

#365Gratitude Day 314: Back in the saddle

This Friday we're recording another Big Little Podcast episode about diapers.  I'm super excited to be back doing this.  Apparently, lots of folks are excited about it, too.  We've got some great guests lined up for the panel, some old friends and some new.  When I posted about it on Fetlife, lots of people confirmed they'd be attending right away.  Some folks I really wanted on shuffled some stuff around and made sure they could be there, too.

I love doing this.  I love that other people love it too.  Saddle up, everyone! Yeehaw!

#365Gratitude Day 313: Practice makes

It never fails.  Each time I watch the movie Peaceful Warrior, I get something good from it.  Yesterday I was having a long conversation with a friend, L. about mindfulness, stress, and overthinking, and told her about the scene in the movie where Socrates pushes Dan off the Strawberry River Bridge.  

So then I put on the movie and watched the whole damn thing.  Which by the way you can too, for free, right here.

PEACEFUL WARRIOR (Sub. Esp) from MASSIMO on Vimeo.

I stumbled across this other scene that really, really got to me.  It's at about 1 hour, 33 minutes.  I don't want to spoil it for you.  If you haven't seen the movie and  don't want to watch the whole thing, go ahead and just slide that sucker over, and watch for a few minutes.  You'll get the important stuff.

The key thing is this - there's this lesson we've been taught all our lives, practice makes perfect.  But actually, that's a lie.  The practice isn't about the perfection.  It's about the practice itself.  We really can't control what happens to us.  We have no idea how the story is going to turn out, except for one thing, which is that every story ends.  (We all die eventually.  Cheery, huh?) It's not the ending that's the good part, it's the whole story.  

I saw this in effect in my own life, immediately.  I have this particular coding problem I've been banging my face against for days.  Out of pride, I've been trying to teach it to myself, with minimal help from professional colleagues.  I have this sort of online forum I hang out in where we all gather to exchange information, answer questions, etc.  I've been pinging members of the group privately asking for pointers, but trying not to do so in the main public chat.  After I watched the movie, I realized I was blocking myself out of pride.  I feared showing these folks as a whole, that I wasn't capable, didn't know enough.  One of the more senior members of the group took me to task for it, saying that the questions I had asked him really could have benefitted the whole group, so why not ask them publicly? 

I did.  Two folks stepped out and helped me reason out the thing blocking me from solving my problem.  Together the three of us worked it out.  And you know what? I loved doing that.  Sometimes I forget that what I love about programming is making something out of nothing, wrapping my head around a problem, and without ego or pride, working with others to create something.

Like everything in my life, it's a practice.

#365Gratitude Day 312: Season's...shut up, Wesley

This is just wonderful.