Rough Mornings

by | Oct 16, 2016 | Blog

B is sick and Max is regretting his late night dance party this morning. I’ve been having chest pain and trouble breathing since yesterday afternoon for some reason, I may be getting a respiratory infection.

It could also be a stealthy heart attack or one of those things from Alien is about to explode from my chest in a spray of blood and bone.

I am good with any one of the three.

We had fun last night. There was a time in the past I would not have been able to enjoy that. I was very attached to my schedule and had a deep fear of deviating from it. I hated staying up too late or getting too little sleep.

I think this was probably a reaction against so many years of living without any discipline at all. I got invested in discipline and getting things done, and swung the pendulum too far to that side.

It is good to have a schedule, and we are happiest when we are accomplishing things. We have to temper this with the ability to step back and enjoy ourselves too though.

We need to be able to take time with the people we love, to take time to ourselves.

We need to be ok with publishing a short blog every once in a while.

See you tomorrow.

Unnecessary Suffering

by | Oct 15, 2016 | Blog

It is a difficult thing to open your eyes at 22 and realize you are a complete loser.

I just involuntarily heard that in Trump’s voice.

I was a loser. Very, very, very lame.

No energy.

A lot of people told me I was really not a winner. I don’t remember who, but they told me.

For about two years after 9/11 I was obsessed with the news.

The planes hitting the towers was a catalyst for me as I realized I didn’t know anything about the world, and I decided I had to know everything. I remember getting up early to watch the news, going to class and then coming home to watch 4-5 more hours of it. I had it on all the time. Eventually 9/11 stopped dominating the cycle completely, so I even learned about some other stuff going on in the world.

I really enjoyed it at first. I think that, with living in Lubbock without very many friends and only having school to focus on, being a news junkie gave me a sense of purpose. It made me feel like I was progressing or evolving as a person. It gave me meaning. And, like most losers, I craved knowing more about things than other people, so it gave me that too.

I am sure I was a joy to discuss current events with.

But, apart from being sooooo well informed and knowledgeable, something else happened. I started getting depressed and dealing with anxiety all the time. I knew all about snipers shooting people on the highway and Elizabeth Smart and the Tamil Tigers and Iraq descending into chaos, and I was miserable.

If you’ve read this blog much, you know that I encourage myself and others to face the things that bring us suffering, to lean in to the things that scare us and cause us anxiety, but I am not a masochist.

I don’t encourage many people to seek out suffering, there is plenty coming your way. You don’t need to manufacture it in your life.

Plus, why suffer needlessly over things that you cannot control?

So, I turned off the news, and things got better.

This was probably the birth of mindfulness in my life. The understanding that the present is not only all we have, but all we need took root here.

I am still informed.

I am aware of Brexit and Duterte and Venezuela falling apart and Kim getting robbed and email servers and grabbing people by the…you get it. I know enough to not be someone who sticks their head in the sand. For the first time ever, I am going to vote in the presidential election.

I am not avoiding reality, but I see no reason to soak myself in things that I have no control over.

I try to keep my attention on the things I can have an impact on. I focus on my reactions to things, my family, and the people who do come to me for help. One of the primary reasons I work to make more money is because I would like to have more to give away. It’s not about ignoring reality, but about making sure I keep my resources available to direct them to things that I can actually affect instead of burning all of them on things that are way above my pay grade.

What we focus on matters. It creates our inner life, which is all we have.

Where are you putting your resources?

Goals

by | Oct 14, 2016 | Blog

I have this tendency to think I would like to live in older times, when we lived more naturally, or even just less-segmented lives.

I read about the ways humans used to do things, and when I compare them to how we do things now it seems like we have gone sideways in some places.

But then I think about how much I like my Kindle and being able to go see family in East Texas without it being a 4-day ordeal.

I like podcasts and antibiotics and not having to deal with Mongol invaders.

I am fully in touch with the fact that for all my talk, I get out of bed every morning and use an electric grinder to make fancy coffee in a computerized Keurig so I can immediately sit down with my laptop while listening to mixes on the YouTube app on my flat screen television.

I’m not exactly a mountain man.

Maybe I can call myself a backyard guy. Unless there’s a new Netflix series I like.

I spent Monday hanging out with Max because he had a pretty rough fever, and today I am taking him to a trampoline park, and these are the happiest days I have. I love weekends when I get to hang out with Tyler, and I have really great memories of how much time I got to spend with him when he was a little kid. I look forward to seeing B every single day, and dislike how little time we get together.

I think about dropping Max off at daycare every morning and sending Tyler off to learn from people I don’t know and not seeing B from 7am until 8 or 9 at night a lot of the time. I look at the amount of time I spend doing billing and accounting and notes and quarterly taxes and health and car and home insurance and oil changes and property tax and letterhead and intake forms and car registration and all the other stuff that doesn’t actually seem real, and I wonder if there is a better way.

I get that this is all part of living in a modern society, and it is part of the tradeoff for rats not eating my children and not having a hole drilled in my head to let demons out.

But there’s a part of me that thinks I should buy a bunch of land and learn to hunt and use my days hanging out with the people I love. I think I would be pretty happy spending all of my time with my family and being able to make having friendships more of a priority.

In all honesty, this is what I am working toward. I write every day, on this blog and working on a book, with the hope that one day I will be able to work from home, or at least spend a lot less time away from it. I am intensely focused on paying off all the debt I have to make this more possible.

When I think about the theme of this blog, that we are one step closer to dying every day and that we should be intentional with our time, nothing is more prevalent in my thoughts than wanting more time with B, Tyler and Max, and not having this taken from me by outside sources.

That is what I see as freedom or “making it”.

What are your goals? What do want out of life? What are you doing to bring these things about?

It matters.

Don’t Label Me, Man!

by | Oct 13, 2016 | Blog

We all like labels.

They make things more convenient, and they make communication possible.

Take chairs. It may be odd, but chairs are among my favorite things. I like going to furniture stores only because I can sit in different chairs. And this is where labels are helpful.

There are a lot of different kinds of chairs. Rocking chairs, recliners, lawn chairs, deck chairs, folding chairs, folding chairs with pads on them, those terrible interlocking chairs they use at churches and conferences. Glide rockers, armchairs, smoking chairs, director’s chairs, high chairs, those swivel chairs that go up and down with a whoosh. You get the picture.

These names are helpful and allow us to discuss chairs in a useful way, and doing so would be impossible without them. Without labels, we would have to have individual names for not only every kind of chair in existence, but for every actual chair within every single subset. Literally billions and billions of individual names or numbers to remember in order to say anything about chairs.

So, labels are convenient and necessary, but they destroy nuance and individuality.

You can see this in the isms that plague us. Racism is a convenient way not to have to deal with individuals from a group you fear, and sexism allows people to make broad assumptions about how to deal with half of the human population. Convenient, but not helpful.

So, it is important to look at the labels we apply to ourselves, and that we allow others to apply to us. Does your job define you? Your status as a parent or not-parent? Your race, gender, sex or sexuality? What about the labels that are applied to us professionally?

Some of the worst effects of labeling come from the labels placed on our mental state by the professional class of mental labelers.

Psychiatrists, doctors, psychologists, and, yes, counselors.

These are the things I hear almost daily:

I am borderline.

I am OCD.

I am bipolar.

I am a major depressive with anxiety.

I am a drug/sex/shopping/internet/porn/gaming addict. I am an alcoholic.

The scary thing about these, to me, is the totalizing effect they can have on people and, even scarier, how I watch people begin to fall more and more into line with these labels.

Without realizing it they start to alter their behavior to fit the confines of the label. Yes, some people use them as an excuse not to take care of the things they should be taking care of, but more often than not I see it happen without their full understanding that it is happening. Once we buy into a label, confirmation bias starts kicking in.

It can be helpful to ask ourselves where the labels we have been given actually apply and where they do not. I have yet to find any label that actually summarizes a person or a thing or place totally and completely. Where are you selling yourself short?

Neutral Tasks

by | Oct 12, 2016 | Blog

Ok, Mindful Monday, I remembered this time.

Today, pick a task that you have to do that you do not enjoy. It can be anything.

These are the ones I hear most frequently:

Doing the dishes

Cleaning the house

Commuting to work

Sitting through a meeting

Working out

Mowing the lawn

It is almost always things like this. Notice that there is nothing inherently bad or painful about any of them, they are unpleasant only by comparison to what we would rather be doing. They are all neutral. There are always things coming in through our sense we can notice without judgment.

How do we use mindfulness to do things we don’t enjoy doing?

We just do them and we just notice.

The temperature of the water and the feel of the dishes.

The sound of the vacuum cleaner, the slight resistance it offers on the carpet.

The things around us and what they look like without our conditioned understanding of them. We only know that a car is a car and what it does because of conditioned understanding, what would we think if we had never seen anything like it?

The sound of words, and what they sound like without this same conditioned understanding. Notice what your muscles feel like as you move them, how slight tweaks and changes can shift the experience radically.

Notice the temperature of the air around you without using words like hot or cold.

Most things are neutral, our mind colors them one way or another. Pick a task you have in front of you today and do it without judgment.

Then pick another one and another one.

That’s all there is too it.