#365Gratitude: I (mostly) shut myself up

So, a friend of mine posted this pic today:

(Looks like Darryl from the Walking Dead.  It's a bearded, dirty looking man, in a forest, standing with his face upturned, eyes closed, sunshine on his face.  Caption: "I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE DAY... THAT PEOPLE ENJOY LIFE AND STOP BITCHING ABOUT EVERYTHING.")

My knee-jerk reaction, which I at first followed, was to leave a comment.  "Don't you see that this is just more bitching? How about you just enjoy your own life and don't worry about other people's bitching?" 

Not a split second later, I realized I was doing it too, by leaving the comment.

So, I started to add to the comment, that it was super funny how I got caught in the self-sustaining bitching whirlpool of it all.

Then, a few seconds into that, realized the ludicrous nature of even that, and deleted the whole thing.  

Alright then, great - why am I writing about it here then?!  

Stick with me, this is a pretty big gratitude, and potent enough to stop me in my tracks, and get me to actually write a gratitude post, which to be honest, I've been too fried and busy to keep up doing lately.

In the space of that two to three minutes between see stimulus, deliver  automatic response, edit it, rescind it utterly, and lastly achieve mindful silence, is one of the practices that I work really, really hard to cultivate within myself.  It's a constant fight, endless work, but so very worthwhile.

I'm struggling to name for you exactly what the practice is.  Perhaps it's called emotional hygiene.  

It's so easy to get caught up in attachments, in shenpa.  That particular meme is an example of the anger shenpa, which is an expression of outrage about anything in one's life.  It can be inward focused or based on something outside oneself, about another, or life in general.

Examples:

Here are some nice juicy inner ones that I have been hooked with lately: 

"Why am I so fucking fat?  I hate that.  Once I'm thinner, eating right and working out again I'll be happy."
"I better start writing again.  I can't stand it when I don't write."
"I hate when I feel like I treat my partners like sexual gratification ATM's.  I'm going to alienate them if I don't get that under wraps."
"I better get all the various things related to moving from my old house to my new house right, so I don't cause myself a giant financial disaster."

And now for a bunch of saucy outer examples:

"Why are people such goddamn sheep, ready to be angry at whatever everyone else is angry about?"
"Why do so many overly religious people not see how they use their religion to fuck up the lives of other people?"
"Why is social media such a cesspool of group think, vanity, and human ugliness?"
"I wish (estranged relative) would just not be such an intolerant asshole so I could do something about being estranged from them."

 The thing I did when I deleted my comment to the picture above was something I learned about from Pema Chödrön in Getting Unstuck.  I caught myself swept up in reaction and mindlessness and then consciously made the decision to stay.  What I mean is, to stay with the feelings I felt, ride them like a rough current on a river, and see them through before acting.  I realized that the little electric zing of unhappiness and snarky response I was feeling to the picture came from me.  Then I realized that even the attempt to point it out was that same feeling, just misdirected a bit.  

"When you think everything is someone else's fault, you will suffer a lot.  When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy. -- Dalai Lama"

I was making myself feel the snark and unease.  It was me.  This is like 300 level zen thinking.  Sometimes it rains.  Sometimes that rain is an absolutely torrential downpour.  And you don't have to stand in it, getting wet.  You can go inside, put up an umbrella, bust out the super serious grade rain gear, whatever.  You have tons of choices.  You can't change that it's raining.  That's what's happening.  But you can observe your own emotional hygiene, and not get sucked into a cycle of action-reaction.  

That doesn't mean you don't get upset, angry, fearful, disappointed.  That does happen.  It's like the rain.  You can't selectively shut off your emotional response.  It's part of being alive.  But once the emotion happens, you do have the chance to mindfully observe it, and decide what to do with it.  That's what the Dalai Lama was talking about, and that's what Pema meant by staying.  

There's a verse in the Tao te Ching that speaks exactly to this, which I think I understand just a bit better today than I ever have before.  This one:

56

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.

Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.
It can't be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

Closing my mouth, blocking my senses, blunting my sharpness, untying my knots, softening my glare, settling my dust - these are all staying.  I give up, for now.  I'm grateful that I can.

#365Gratitude: Healthy Habits, No Trout About It

This morning I'm at the gym getting ready to go swimming. It's been a while since I wrote a gratitude post. I've been dealing with the stress of finding a new house.  

Thankfully, the worst part of that process is over. We've found and been approved for a new home.  

In the midst of all this stress I've been barely working out at all, and eating horrendously.  It's caused me to gain weight and feel awful.  

But this morning, I'm back at it. I ate a small breakfast on my way to the gym, and spent the drive thinking about self-care. 

Over the past few weeks, I've had to say no's to some folks over a variety of things. I actually feel really good about this.  Knowing one's own boundaries, having a sense of self, is really important. 

Taking care of oneself, practicing self-care, does not make you selfish.  It's not just okay to take care of oneself, it actually helps you in your efforts to do the best you can for others. 

I'm grateful that I know how to take care of myself, so I can make good choices around my ability to help others too.  

#365Gratitude: Execution of stay

Yesterday, I got some bad news.

A house we were looking to rent got snatched out from under us.  For whatever reason, the landlord decided to go with someone else.  That's the second time this has happened to me in the past two months.  

I found out while I was at work.  It was like having a bomb dropped on my head.  

For a few hours, I was pretty useless.  I bitched to my family, bitched to our realtor, put in inquiries on several other houses.  I felt my stomach turn into a pot of cold ball bearings, grease, and pieces of glass.  My heart thumped in my chest like someone was punching me from the inside.

This is pretty natural.  It's reaction.  A thing happens, I react.  Just like everyone else.

Then I got my shit together.  Which is to say, I stopped trying to get my shit together, and just got back to doing what I was working on when the bad news bomb first went off.  I had this technical problem I was working through, trying to assemble some data into the appropriate javascript structure to use with a jQuery plugin.  I fiddled and fussed and made progress.

Earlier in the day, I had contemplated going home, I felt so paralyzed with anger, worry, and fear.  But I ended up staying late, my nose buried deep in the code.  I didn't finish what I was doing, but I made great strides.  It felt good.

What I was doing, that whole time, was staying.

This is something I learned about from Pema Chödrön, in her book/audio lecture Getting Unstuck.  Our whole lives we're taught to run from suffering, that discomfort and pain are just not to be allowed in any way.  It's bullshit.  We expend more energy running away from feeling something bad than just outright feeling it.  Instead, you can lean into the pain, really take a good damn look at it, feel it, and move through it.

At 1:30 I was having chest pains.  At 3:30 my girlfriend Squee messaged me to check on me and I told her I was "not great, having trouble thinking, and leaving at 4:30".  At 4:30 I had started to make progress, and was deep in my code.  I didn't leave until six.

At one point, I told her how I'd started to get my code to work, and then observed, "staying is powerful. Crazy powerful."  I told her about what I had experienced staying:

You don't do it. It's done.
If you do it, you're just trying to do it.
If it's done, it happened.

Which I added, is the sort of crazymaking batshit talk that drives people bananas about zen stuff.

After my commute, I had another episode of expectation fever, which again, is normal.  Sadly, I made bad food choices (I really didn't need two bowls of cereal after my initial small dinner.  But my samsarra got out of control, and I tried to comfort eat.  Go me!) I got lost for a while in my bad feelings, again.  

Then I remembered to stay, again.  

You know when this lesson is over?  Never.

I'm grateful for it. 

#365Gratitude: Crisis Text Line: One of the best things ever.

No puns, no hyperbole, no silly talk.

The other day I saw a message from a friend on social media about a number you can text, 24 hours a day, and be immediately connected to a crisis counselor, who will talk to you about ANYTHING.  

(The number is 741 741.  Just text the word "HELLO" to it or "START".)

This anything includes:
- Anxiety
- Suicidal thoughts.
- Chronic Pain
- Cutting
- Depression
- Abuse
- Addiction
- Sexuality
- Gender
- Grief

I couldn't believe it.  So I texted it.

Melissa, a volunteer responded to me.  I asked her:

"A friend told me about this, wanted to make sure it was real before I blog about it - which I ABSOLUTELY will. Is this just for suicidal ideation?  Or can you text with other issues?  I've been reading your site. This is a marvelous thing. I intend to tell people far and wide about it.  I'm both kinky and polyamorous. As are many of my friends. Is this service friendly to alternative folks such as us?"

She responded:

CTL is friendly to all kinds of people in crisis. We don't discriminate.

This, in my opinion, is one of the greatest things I have ever heard of.  If you need someone to talk to when you're in crisis, no matter what time of day it is, they can help.  If you want to know more, or help them out, their website is http://www.crisistextline.org/

#365Gratitude: Barely Manalow... or Oh the Huge Mana Tee

First, a little note about the blog - I know I've been super sketchy with these posts lately.  I'm going to address that in just a little bit, in this post.  Stand by!

So, yesterday.  Not my best day.  I have a relative who I love very dearly, who in recent years has become a very religious, very conservative person.  They've also become a bigot.  (Please note here that I am not saying that religion = bigotry.  That's not the math.  That's just true for this person, in this case.)  They regularly say cringe inducing things about gay people, and transgender people, too.  We've gone some rounds over it, and had reached a shaky detente.  I was resolved to keep my opinions to myself.

Yeah, not so much.  Yesterday, we had a little social media blowout, where I just had had enough, and told them I was ashamed of them.  Publicly.  

I had like a sort of grief hangover from it, the rest of the day.  I ranted to some loving folks who would listen.  Then I did what any sensible person would do.  I went out for pizza and to the movies with my wife, a co-worker, and one of my closest friends.  Seriously, that's what you do.  Look it up, it's in the manual.

Anyhow, the gratitude part that happened just now.  I was having a little disaster-debrief with Brother and with our friend Felix.  I was saying how this particular relative and I looked like we weren't going to be talking for a while.  Truthfully, I could use the breather from dealing with their bigotry anyhow, because I have a lot on my plate in my own daily life.

That was when I said:

"I have exactly zero spoons for much else."

This is when the magical thing I'm grateful for happened.  Felix, brother and I had this conversation:

Felix: "But you don't have a chronic illness, mako "
Spacey: "Is there a root for the expression of having spoons I'm not aware of? I think in brother's case he is referring to mental capacity for stress. Though I know it often is also used to refer to physical capacity or energy outlay needed. 
Should spoons only be used in the context of chronic illness and why? (Honest question.)"

I was in fact referring to being mentally spent from stress.  There is a really good reason why "spoons" should only be used when describing chronic illness and its relationship to energy.  I knew this too.  The whole spoon thing was originally created by Christine Miserandino.  It's brilliant, really.  You should read it: http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/

But anyhow, then Felix, who is a very smart person, told me something I hadn't really thought through.  She told me this:

It's just a question of co-opting resources.  People with chronic illnesses and disabilities already have a hard time making their conditions understood, and most people don't take the time to empathize. By using spoons to describe everyday life stuff, it takes away from the original meaning. 

The boldfacing is mine, fyi.

This is a big deal.  I apologized for being offensive, and she said no apology was necessary, but just to not take those spoons from people who really need them.

This relates back hugely to why I was venting about my grief hangover in the first place.  The thing that bothered me about my bigoted relative was their utter lack of empathy for people that they didn't understand.  It's not a giant social imposition to allow people who are transgender to have a safe place to pee.  It's practicing empathy.

Felix suggested to us, regarding the spoons thing, that maybe I could come up with a different term.  And I have!

I suggest for those of us who do NOT in fact have a chronic illness that instead of being out of or low on spoons, we can instead say we are low on mana.  

For those of you who are not video game players, or fantasy novel obsessed, mana is "a word found in Austronesian languages meaning "power, effectiveness, prestige," where in most cases the power is understood to be supernatural."  It's magic juice, mojo, creative power.  

I freaking love this.  In video games (like Diablo, a favorite of mine) mana is often represented by a little potion bottle, filled with otherworldly glowing liquid.  As you cast Magic Missile, or Obliterate Traffic Jam, or Make Amazingly Fluffy Egg White Omelet with Side of Mystical Hashbrowns, the amount of mana you have gets lower, and can even possibly run out completely.

There are TONS of ways to replenish one's mana.  It tends to regenerate slowly over time by itself, or you can do things to re-up it quickly.  

In a video game, that's usually drink a potion, or touch a special artifact.  In the real world that can be getting some sleep, having time to be alone, spending time with people who lift you up, eating comfort food, going for a walk, listening to a great piece of music.   

I am going to start using this expression often.  And probably get some of the cutesy clever mana/magic themed merch I've put examples of in this post.  I would love a huge mana t-shirt. 

Relatedly though, the whole episode has me feeling better.  Why?  Because I was able to see that learning to practice empathy is a constant mindful discipline.  What my one relative isn't doing, and may never do, helped me to see when I wasn't doing it, for something else.  I didn't have malicious intent, but I had to make the effort to witness it.  And because I was in a kind of raw place, I could see it, which was kind of magical, really.

And that was really recharging to me.  Which is why I'm barely low on mana at all, just now.