#365Gratitude Day 4:I've got the time

This one's a bit ineffable, so stick with me for a bit here.  This morning's been busy.  I got dressed, made myself a nice breakfast, did some house chores and financial management type stuff, and sat down to spend a good hour and half or so on my side project.

I've been struggling with this little interface nicety, about selecting rows in a table, especially in a tiny space, like on a cell phone.  While I worked, I was listening to a favorite album, on Spotify, Phillip Lober's Children of the Wind.

At a certain point, I made a good decision about how I'm going to move forward, technically.  I looked up, where that green arrow is pointing, and saw the time.  I realized that if I wanted to get to my day job on time, I couldn't do any more work on it just now.

It felt frustrating.  But then, I had a flash of insight.  

I've got the time.  Expecting to be done with something, anything really, by a certain time, is a shenpa, an attachment.  Specifically, it's a form of the anger shenpa.  "If I just get this done by then, then everything will be perfect.  The fact that that's not the case, or might not be the case is unacceptable and thus makes me angry!"

Don't mistake me, I'm not confusing determination for anger.  It's a good thing to push forward, be ambitious, seek change and roll with it.  The problem is the attachment.  Attachment gets in my way.  

I did spend a good amount of time this morning realizing the reason my checkboxes weren't displaying on the page I was building was because I was missing some needed CSS and JS files.  And I did get it working, enough to see that the direction I first was headed in was not the direction I wanted.  It wasn't time wasted, not at all.

What's more, I had a loosely held plan, and I traded it for a new, slightly different, but also loosely held plan.

Tonight, when I get home, I've got some time to myself.  Missy will be away doing something else tonight, so I can pick it up when I get home.  

When I stop fretting about it, I see the truth: I have all the time in the world to keep going on things that are important to me.  When do I have it?

Now.

#365Gratitude Day 3:and four peas

There's this scene in the movie Secretary that I absolutely love.  Lee Holloway, is the secretary and submissive to E. Edward Grey, a meticulous, somewhat neurotic lawyer who yearns to sadistically spank and otherwise control her.

In the particular scene, things are heating up between Lee and Edward, and he's regularly spanking her, making her crawl on all fours, and over the phone even dictating exactly how much and what she can eat.

I just adore this movie, and that scene in particular.  When she eats the odd, sparse dinner, the rest of her very vanilla family look on in bewilderment.  They just don't get it.  But Lee's face, at first on the phone, and then later as she's eating the peas, is caught up in a rapture of ecstasy.

Why?  Because she's living her authentic life.  This is who and what she wants to be.

The reason it's my gratitude, or a piece of it, is because I live this way, too, sort of.

My wife Missy, and my girlfriend Alissa are my Mommy and my Auntie respectively.  Recently, just after New Year's, we decided together that it was in my best interest to start tracking my food and exercise again, and they both expressed an interest in me sharing pictures of everything I eat with them, so they can keep an eye on me.

And that's exactly what we've been doing, me and my kink parents, for days now.

Here are some of the pictures in our group text.  You can see the salad and steak I had for dinner the night before, the fish sandwich and fries I had for lunch before that, the pretzel M&M's I had for a snack, and the simple little breakfast I had earlier in the day.

You can also see the thumbs-up emoticon that Mommy sent us both, showing that she approved of many of my choices.

At work today, I already noticed some positive effects to all this, too.  I ate moderate portion sizes, and had water more than graze on junk food in the kitchen.

In this group chat we have, the two of them have talked to one another about me, and what I'm doing, how I'm eating.  It feels a bit like having dinner around the family dining room table.  It feels a bit like the 4 peas scene, too.

What really sticks with me is how the three of us, even separated by distance, are living an authentic life, together.  That feels so damn good.

#365Gratitude Day 2:Mount Mindful

There's this iPhone game I really like called Alto's Adventure.

In the game, you're a snowboarder in a remote mountain village, and you level by endlessly snowboarding, doing more and more complex tricks, jumping impossible canyons, and just endlessly going.

The controls are dead bang simple.  There's really only one.  You press on the screen at the right time, to jump, and the more you hold down your finger, the more you roll backwards to flip as you jump.

I bought the game when it first came out.  I rapidly got through the first 20 levels.

Then I spent about a year, stuck trying to get the last achievement to get past that level, landing two triple-backflips.

Once you've been playing the game for even a few minutes, you'll think, "TWO TRIPLE BACK FLIPS?! That's RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE.  What else do they want me to do? Divide by zero?"

But it is, in fact, possible.  I did it a few days ago.

Since then, I've bumped up several levels, until I got stuck again on something else.

"Survive through rain and snow in one run."

Doing a long enough run to move through snow and rain doesn't sound like a very hard goal.  But I kept flubbing it.  I'd travel through some rain, and then get all excited, and tense.  "Oh boy, I just gotta move through snow, and then I'm good."

Every single time I'd think this, I'd crash within the next minute or so, without fail.

Then I remembered what it was that got me past my triple-backflip problem.  I intentionally stopped caring about it.  I mean, it's not that I didn't want to progress.  Of course, I did.

But that was just my goal of the moment.  And once I owned it, and put it aside, I could just play, and be fully present for it.  I could enjoy the beautiful music, the lush views, and the really liberating sense of speed and travel that made me fall in love with the game in the first place.

That was when it struck me, that the entire game is a mindfulness exercise.

I started the game up, and told myself to enjoy it, and not focus on the outcome.

I beat the level.

Today, I used my day off to work on a side software project of mine.  I had Alto's Adventure on my mind all day.  I solved three maddening technical issues one after another, using the same sort of intentional disconnect I had used earlier in the game.  

I figured out for example, that when you use Datatables with Bootstrap that the order in which the CSS and JS files load on the page can have an effect on how the page is rendered.  I figured out a bad css call elsewhere on the page can compromise a call further down the page.  I did a code pull from the repository where I'm keeping the code, and figured out that something my business partner did was goofing me up, and was able to work around it.

When I wasn't worried about what had happened, or what would happen, but instead was focused on what was happening, I became so much more capable, so present.

There's a scene in the movie Peaceful Warrior that really speaks to this.  Dan, a gymnast and the spiritual student of the mysterious Socrates, meets him on a bridge near his college campus.  Dan's in a big hurry to get to the gym for something important, so he asks Socrates to take care of whatever-it-was that he called him to the bridge for, quickly.

And Socrates pushes him right off the bridge into the water.

After Dan confronts him angrily about what he did, and why, Socrates explains that he cleared his mind.  Then he tells him why that's good.  Here, watch.

I can tell you he's right.

#dailyThink:Duh, shut up!

So, still doing this blogging thing.

It's been 926 days now that I've been doing it, 2 years, 6 months, and 12 days.  Over this time, a lot has changed, in my life, and in even how I blog.  I've:

• Blogged every day
• Changed where I live (twice)
• Blogged only when I felt like it
• Changed my day job (twice)
• Numbered every entry meticulously
• Gained friendships
• Stopped numbering altogether
• Lost friendships
• Skipped over days at my leisure.
• Regained friendships
• Caught up in waves.
• Experienced death and loss
• Added special titles that get used as twitter hashtags.
• Starting dating new partners
• Also linked to Google+
• Deepened and strengthened my existing relationships
• Stopped posting to Google+

Along the way, I've discovered a bunch of things.  WWFM, What Works For Me™ is a moving target.  It changes, just like I change.

One thing that I've had my eye on lately isn't just that I blog, but why.  I blog for me, as well as for you.

Yes, specifically you, the person reading this.

I'm a strong believer that we're all each other's student, and all each other's teacher, too.  It's not that I have special insight or answers to give anyone.  I don't think it even works like that.  Rather, as I'm going about my daily practices of mindful living, study, meditation, and contemplation and stumble over my own questions, I think that maybe, possibly, there's value in sharing that stuff with those who want to hear about it.

And if you're reading this, then that's you, my friend.

"All right, fine," you say, "but what's up with the passive aggressive title on this post then?"

Well, it's kind of a pun.

That character over there, that's te, pronounced kind of like "duh", and it's the chinese word for "virtue."  

Not virtue like pulling drowning kittens out of a freezing river by hand, on an arctic ice floe somewhere.  (Which begs the questions how the kittens got there, what you're doing there, and why not just look for kittens in a no-kill shelter, like a sensible person.)

Rather the virtue I'm talking about is more like the virtues of getting a good night's sleep, or regularly masturbating (especially in front of someone you love.)

There's te in a lot of things.  One of the biggest things there's virtue in is letting go of judgement, and just well, living.

There's a verse of the Tao te Ching that speaks to this handily.

2.

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Now before I even get into this, and why it's on my mind, I can already hear a potential objection.  "Wait a sec, Mako.  If you're no guru, have no special insight, why the heck are you teaching me a thing? Or telling me how to go about doing this living thing properly?"  

I'm not.  I don't have answers for you.  I'm just sharing my own exploration of questions I stumble across.  If you do what I do, and it works for you, that's lovely.  If you don't do what I do, that's lovely, too.  If you shut down the browser, throw away your bookmark for my page, and go out for pizza with anchovies on it, that's just fine with me too.  (Even though anchovies are revolting.)  

I'm just sharing.  You're free to not partake.  It's all good.

Having said that, this verse has been on my mind for days, weeks even, because of something I've been hearing going around, something I've even bought into and participated in myself, sometimes.

It's that whole "2016 sucks, and is out to get people, look at who it has killed now" thing.

I'm actively working hard to not do it anymore.  Never mind that 2016 is now over, because actually, there is no over.  This is where the shutting up part comes in.

The truth is, the fact that it's January 1st, 2017 is, at best, sort of an illusion.  The only place is here, the only time is now.  We live in the eternal present.  There's never any time you're not here, and it's not now.  Go on, name one for me.  I'll wait.

Actually, I won't.  Because you can't.  Every second of every minute of every day you're alive, you're in motion, towards (yay?) your eventual death.

Stuff happens.  People are born.  They die.  We celebrate.  We grieve.  We laugh.  We cry.

Over and over.  

Until we don't.

The thing in this particular entry from the Tao te Ching that really stuck with me is this part:

Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.

All sorts of things arise.  David Bowie dies.  Trump gets elected president.  Malaria gets utterly eradicated in Sri Lanka.  US unemployment hits 4.6 percent, the lowest it's been in nine years.  I lose a very important friendship.  I regain and even strengthen that friendship.

What I see is this - pointing to some external thing, time, entity and bemoaning the tragedy is a toxic form of expectation.  By the same token, getting upset that other people do this is similarly, a toxic form of expectation.

People are people.  We're gonna do what we're gonna do.  Me, I'm not interested in being less mindful, and lamenting that things or people should be other than what they are.  

And the truth is, death's still coming for me, you, and everyone else.  Shitty things and good things are on the rise for each of us, because everything is always moving anyhow.

If you want to shake your fist at the heavens over that, you certainly don't need anyone's blessing to go right ahead.

But as for me, I'm doing my best not to do that.

When?  Right now.

#365Gratitude Day 1:It's a sweeter.

So I've had this sort of repetitive gag going for years.  

Every single time someone is getting a wrapped gift in front of me, I always say "Oh, I know what it is!"

And when, as inevitably they will, they ask, "Really? What?"  my answer is always the same.

"It's a sweater!"

I say this no matter what the wrapped package looks like.  It could be a tiny little thing you hold in your hand, a flat envelope, a giant TV-sized box.  Always the same answer.

Comedy gold, right?

You'd think this thing would get kind of old.  It does.  That's actually where the true comedy of the thing comes in.  Everyone who knows me well has heard me do this, ad infinitum.  People smile patiently, some cringe, some shake their heads.

One of my favorite Christmas presents of all time is this white sweater that our girl Rachel bought for me, then by hand "upgraded" to have a shark pattern needlepointed on it.  It's amazing, it's badass, I love it.

My friend Moliére and I are amongst the closest of friends.  We've been friends for several years now, and really consider one another family.  He recently learned about my sweater thing, and made it his own in this really (and literally) sweet way, when we were visiting him this past weekend.

Aren't these awesome?

After he gave them to me, I said that I wanted to have them with him, when he comes to visit us, down here.  I love sharing an inside joke, and love having such a close friend.  I love him lots.