#365Gratitude Day 279:Circular Logic

So this morning, as is becoming my habit, I went out for a run, sharing it remotely with my girlfriend Squee, and my bestie, Moliére.  It was a good workout, filled with hills, all sorts of funny puns about kink and computers (subroutines, DOM navigation, master-and-slave-controllers, etc.), too.

On my way back to the cul-de-sac I live in (infinite loop, anyone?), I noticed I was at 3.9 miles for the workout, so I decided to walk the cul-de-sac over and over until I hit the 4 miles I wanted.

It's like a piece of modern art!

I'm happy I did it, but I also notice several things that made me able to do it.

• For one, I'm a bit OCD.  I like round numbers, filled spaces, evenly balanced things.
• It enabled me to stay on the phone just a bit longer with two people I love very much.
• As I make working out more of a habit, a routine, I'm beginning to lean on it and into it.  I need it.
• I feel hope in the small gains.  I only ran one interval today, but felt good about it.  I'm in touch with the truth that progress comes in gradual waves.  I know I'm not some skyrocket, that has to launch, go up without stopping, only to explode.

I'm loving my progress.

#dailyThink:It's more like a guideline really

This has been rather a sloppy sort of year for my blog. I started off not numbering, got spotty about posting daily, went back to numbering, still remained spotty.  

But I'm still here, and still blogging.  

There's a saying (usually misquoted as being said by Aristotle), that "We are what we repeatedly do."

I agree.  

I think part of that repetitive process is mindfully stepping back from it and adjusting it, the same way you aim a spray of water from a hose, or shoot a water gun.  

I go through something similar in my day job as a programmer. Try a thing, see if it works, adjust, try again.  Sometimes I will get something working, see an entirely better way to do it, and rebuild it. There's even a term for it, refactoring. 

I think adopting the practice of mindful refactoring has been, and continues to be a success strategy in my life.

• Try something.
• See how it works.
• Throw it out if it's not working for me.
• Keep going with it if I am happy with the results. 

Wash, rinse, repeat. Repeat until dead. You get the idea. This strategy is everywhere  in my life. I use it at work, at home, in relationships, my health, my finances.  

It's even inherent in my spirituality or philosophy. One of my favorite Lao-tzu quotes is "A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent upon their arrival." 

I do, ultimately, have a final destination. We all do. But how I get there, what road I travel, and what I do to enjoy the trip, that's what matters.  

#365Gratitude Day 278:Consent P*rn

Some days I see or hear something early in the day that pushes my gratitude button so hard, I know right away that's my gratitude today .

I have a funny relationship to pornography. I feel the same way about it as Billy Joel feels about sex vs. peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Good sex-positive porn? Yes, please. Bad misogynistic, sex-negative porn? No thanks. 

This morning I was using Flipboard to peruse some of my usual sources and stumbled across this sexy, yet not obscene image that expresses this attitude perfectly. 

A woman in a shirt and panties, shot from the waist down. The panties read "ASK FIRST" 

Awesome.  I see so many good messages here. "This is my body. It's beautiful. Have a look.  Want to do anything else with it? Ask me, because it's mine."

This might be the sexiest thing I have ever seen.  

(It comes from the usually very NSFW blog at  http://porn4ladies.tumblr.com/)

#365Gratitude Day 277:A Cereal Love Story

So it's no secret that I, I should say, we, love Finding Nemo, and its sequel, Finding Dory.  A little while after we saw the new movie (which is stellar), Mommy got us a plushie baby Dory, Destiny the Whale Shark, and Bailey the Beluga Whale.

We were walking through Wal-Mart shopping for something else entirely when we saw Destiny, and with an almost audible pop, my littler self mako-kun came rushing to the surface.  He grabbed Destiny, and had this piteously needy expression on his face.  (My face?  Dissociation makes things confusing sometimes.)  Mommy not only got Destiny for him, but found those other two  right away.

A while goes by, and I forget where we first saw it, but we heard that there was actually Finding Dory cereal!  Mako-kun wanted this with the white hot fury of a thousand suns.  At first, I wasn't inclined to go get it, because sugared cereal, blah blah blah, grown up bullshit talk, etc etc.  

But it became like this thing with him.  Often when he and I are communicating, he "speaks" to me nonverbally, showing me a cascade of images one after another, or one image, very sharply.   That became, you guessed it, the box of Finding Dory cereal we saw on the internet.  It's a placeholder as a symbol for a bunch of different things, including:

• Stop.  Listen to me.
• This is serious.
• You're not paying attention to what I want/need/would really like to have since you love me so much.
• I don't ask for much.
• PLEASE

Along the way this little internal dialogue caught Mommy's notice, and my Auntie Squee's notice too.  This was not hard, because hints of it were everywhere.  

Yesterday I went out on errands, which included among other things, grocery shopping.  I went out of my way looking for the cereal, but couldn't find it.

I did get this other Krave cereal, which had a thing on it to get these Finding Dory points so you could save up and send away for a cool projection lamp.  But mako-kun was crushed.  I promised him the next time I went shopping I would go looking.

Then we came home, and found that MOMMY HAD ALREADY GOT SOME WHILE SHE WAS OUT TOO.  She found it at a Walgreen's.  We exercised restraint and didn't tear the box open.  Actually, it wasn't that hard, we wanted to really savor the cereal, really take our time.  So we waited until after I had got back from my run this morning, ad we could really eat it slowly, mindfully.

We opened the box.  We got out our favorite shark cereal bowl.  We carefully measured out a portion (1 cup of cereal, and 1/2 a cup of whole milk.)  We noticed the little Dory marshmallows (and Nemo ones too.)  We got a giggle or two out of "finding" Nemo and Dory, several times.  We realized that all of the makoish things there are to eat, and mako-kunish things, that this cereal is probably the most mako-kunish thing there is, hands down, ever, period.

Then we ate it.

OH MY GOODNESS IT IS GOOD.

We have the best Mommy in the whole world.

#365Gratitude Day 272:Watts in a good article

Rascal, entertainer, and personal hero Alan Watts. His laughter sounds like music to me.  

It's no secret how much I love the written and spoken work of Alan Watts. Watts was a priest who studied eastern spirituality and philosophy and became a sort of "spiritual entertainer."  

Watts made it very clear he was no guru, he did not have all the answers for you.  Rather, he had a different way of seeing what it meant to be alive, a way you too might try to see.  The ideas he talked about were a mix of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and a distinctly modern sensibility.

His ideas, combined with the work of some others (Pema Chodron, Brené Brown, Dan Millman, Wayne Dyer, and Viktor Frankl) have changed and informed my whole life. 

My friend Manuel sent me a link to a 3,800 word article by Tim Lott about Watts, his life, and his work, Off-Beat Zen.  

I'm very grateful for it. It taught me some things about Watts that I didn't know, and expresses in a marvelously pithy way some of the very complex, powerful, transformative ideas I learned from his work and which are a part of my daily practice.