10 Minute Rule

I used to collect quotes the way children collect playing cards. I would laud each one, storing it away in notebooks that grew beyond the cardboard sheaths. in time quotes turned into passages and passages into books, becoming the library that fills my living space. These quotes, passages, and finally stories brought me joy and also understanding. As I move deeper into myself in search of a core understanding–of a way to move forward, I’ve returned to that core collection of quotes. I’ve bathed in the thoughts of Thich Nhat Hanh, Deepak Chopra, and so many others who offer a path towards mindfulness and towards inner peace.

Another author, Deborah Reber writes, ” Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” That is an important step to take, as it is important to craft a life that is filled with joy and not pain, though often the source of one can be the source of the other through circumstance and emotion. This is why I must let go and let what must happen, abandoning that sense of right and wrong and the corrosive effects of the imbalance that colors my life. Meanwhile I turn inward, hopeful of what I can become as an individual and quietly cultivating what that is.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.” But it is important to consider what we are hoping for. Are we hoping for the impossible–something that cannot exist because too many steps were taken away from that dream and now it is too damaged, too one-sided to be anything more than currently exists? Or do we hope that what is happening–what forms the impossible itself is misunderstood?

 

 

 

 

I believe in happy endings. I believe the path there is cut from the sacrifices of heroes. I believe the stories that speak of such things are built not from a formula per say but from the components of human imagination. Alchemy is defined as “a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.” Imagination is defined as “the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.” I believe these two processes are the same thing, a point in which the human mind reaches beyond the known to connect with what can be known and moreover can be believed.

We are part of an infinite universe that, it seems, stemmed from a singular event–a singular atomic particle. That means we are all connected across the vastness of space and time and the dimensions that we have yet to understand or observe. The particles of life communicate–be it through chemical reaction or the simple kiss of wind against your cheek. Everything is part of that larger conversation. Every snippet of talk I hear as I walk by, every interaction I see, every conversation I overhear informs my conscious and subconscious and grants me momentary access to the imaginable. The alchemy of Imagination is the taking of that raw data and transforming it into a connection between individuals; to build a bridge of understanding that spans what we believe and what we feel.

Perhaps such lofty ideals is too much to ask of a simple story. When I write I pull together these thoughts and I hope that someone gets what I am trying to say. I hope more than someone takes what I am trying to say and performs their own alchemy to shape what I have cast into what they need in order to make sense of where they are.

Like anyone subject to long stretches of failure, hope can seem dim and I can feel like I no longer know how to compose. I am not a philosopher’s stone and cannot always find the right words to transform idea into story, but I can continue to try. For a while I stopped trying and forgot that the key is not to succeed, but to effort. I forgot that the components of imagination still clang and rattle in my psyche no matter what I say or do, and there is nothing else to do but try and turn them into something useful.

I woke up this morning with nothing to say, so I’ll talk about sports.

In a sense sports remain the stereotypical male fallback of items to discuss in a very nonsensical (almost mattering) small talk sort of way. I can tell you that my hometown Yankees are still in the MLB playoffs and face elimination tonight–though I am not a fan of baseball. It is background knowledge I acquire for a specific conversational purpose–like knowing the weather forecast… in the desert. I also know that my Giants, who I actually do care about, have lost all of their starting receivers. For a team that is reliant on passing, having guys they pulled off the street days ago is not a good look.

Sports is a way for others to safely define and categorize us. For example, I am seen as a Giants fan. People can be derisive and poke fun at me in that way and it is not considered in ill humor. It is not seen as mattering as much as say my religous or political affiliations. It is still an affiliation, and I suppose that is the key ingredient in all of this. The binary nature of humanity always circles back to ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ however we choose to define those terms. The more those differences can be clearly defined, the safer we feel about who is around us. This is why the mainstream media is having such a difficult time with the Las Vegas shooter. They cannot find a way to classify this man as them, and are forced to create a context in which he is in no way one of ‘us’ or at least the ‘us’ they promote as the ideal group.

I guess this stopped being about sports a long time ago.

I actively abandoned the happiness chronicles. To quote Thich Nhat Hanh, “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.” In that sense the entirety of what I was trying to accomplish was wrong. I was asking the wrong questions. It isn’t ‘what makes me happy’ but when do I experience this feeling naturally? What are these moments and are they something that is in balance or something I need to devote more time to? The other side of that equation is this: What are the times that bring me sadness? How much time and energy is devoted to that? The answer is too much.

There is another quote on happiness, attributed to Connor Franta, that goes like this, “Use your smile to change the world. Don’t let the world change your smile.” I did let the world–let circumstance–rob me of the very core of my happy engine. Other people’s problems and drama, family drama, the echoes of very bad choices made; all of this combined to steal that critical part of me that makes me who I am. I stopped being a happy person and became this greying, stressed out old man in the span of 5 years. What should be the best part of my life has daily served as the best and the worst largely due to expectations and misunderstandings on both our parts. My partner says I need to find happiness within myself and not in another person, and that fundamental truth is what first led me into the chronicles, but to quote another writer, Heinlein, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Not coincidentally or even germane to the point, hate is the condition in which the pain of another person is essential to your own.

So I am at a place where I’ve abandoned the idea of happiness and fallen back into the idea of distraction. Kissing and holding my partner, playing with my kids, a good story, a film, a game. These are the things that eat my time for the good. Coaching, teaching, trying to understand why my relationship is what it is and how to change that, searching for a place to live, trying to make sense of my finances. These are the things that shove me towards despair. In truth I need to kill off the things that function to kill me and make peace with the truths of the now.

We are not guaranteed any future, but we have the ability and the responsibility to hope. I can do that, if quietly, and try to set the conditions for such things to be reality.

There are certainly things that I hate to do. Grading is right near the top of the list. This is, of course, the backbone of teaching work and what I am paid to do. So, reluctantly, I must do it. But I don’t ever really want to.

Here is the problem as I see it: Too many iterations of the same thing. It is not so much that it is boring. Grading is depressing. I see students making the same mistakes over and over again across the board and I see the same shoddy plagiarism efforts over and again and slowly become jaded on all of those minds. This is in sharp contrast to how things are in the classroom where they are often lively and creative and bring strong talents to bear.

So what is the difference? I don’t really have an answer. I know that it could be the same problem I’ve been having as a writer: Butt in Chair or BIC for short. Taking the time and patience to sit down and do the work is really hard. Sometimes it is hard because you don’t have the time, but more often it is hard because when you do have the time it is much easier and more fun to drown in distractions.

In the Buddhist culture you are supposed to return to grave of your lost loved ones after one hundred days. You do so to perform last rites–a final ceremony in which you, at last, can say goodbye. Today I say goodbye to the love I lost–not through death but through circumstance.

I spent a great deal of time thinking that people who did not believe in soul mates were somehow limited. While this may still be true, that limitation spares them the burden of that ephemeral love. When we consider the concept of soul mates who ever asks what happens when one part of that connection moves on and the other doesn’t? The Ka-tet is broken obviously, but the lives that remain?

In the end I am a person filled with responsibilities. Those things will ultimately tether me, but so far as anything else, anything meaningful, productive? The double edged sword of that soul mate belief is that if you do believe that and you do believe that ultimately love is what drives us all, then what is really left to fight for?

“Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time—that is the basic message.” – Pema Chodron

I woke up this morning. That’s all. It doesn’t entirely matter how much I slept or how or what I first thought when I rose. I did rise to experience something. As I move into the second day of this search for what fills me I am reminded that life fills me. I know what makes me ultimately happy–what brightens my day–and I get to enjoy that almost every day. I’ve been thinking about this in two ways: In the in between times, and the inevitable erosion of that joy because of what is happening when I’m not a part of that life. Yesterday I reached an acceptance of that latter part. I cannot control what other people do. The very idea of impermanence is the abandoning of the expectation that things will remain the same. I can control how much I allow myself to enjoy the moment. I can control how I filter things in the in between.

I know that this doesn’t make entire sense for a lot of readers (given that I don’t check my analytics, I don’t actually know that I have readers). The basics of the situation is this: The best part of my life is also the hardest. So when I am apart from that part of my life and roiling over what happens there, I need to find a way to be centered and happy.

In truth, that is the wrong argument entirely. This search is about being centered and happy within myself and allowing for the duality of I-happiness and We-happiness to be separate things. As of now there is not much by way of I-happiness and that isn’t healthy. I continue returning to the idea of writing as the singular source of I-happiness and perhaps I return there not out of comfort (I really don’t want to write) or obligation (I’ve published enough that I don’t actually feel a need to succeed) but out of love (I just can’t quit you, writing).

So here we are, searching.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I am still hopelessly and insanely in love and that has fundamentally changed me as a human. It changed how I view the world, what I see and feel in it, and what I expect.
2. I have too been changed by the experience of parents in youth sports. Vicarious living is a serious affliction.

My first day of the happiness search was more like a mourning period. Abandoning an idea that has been your fuel for so long is worse than fasting. It is going off a serious drug cold turkey. A lot of emptiness followed. A lot more emptiness remains. Buddha once said of impermanence, “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” So I did and I do. I thought, ‘what makes me happy now?’ I found nothing for a long stretch of time and then my mind wandered into the idea of how it would feel to be buried in story. It could be good. However, thinking about what could be vs. what is has become a rallying cry for depressive thought. So, I cleaned my office and drowned my thoughts in an audiobook.

That worked for a while.

Then the kids were back. Honestly, without them as part of this experience I would not have that present love I spoke of and that alone means that I am not really moving past the need. It is only when all that I love is afar that I can truly focus on what it means to be alone and what is born out of that loneliness–good or bad. I’ll have a great deal of opportunity to explore that over the next few days. In one sense I look forward to the opportunity to grow. In another I am purely terrified of what may come.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. One last chance for the Giants. The kids really want to see the Xmas eve game ($600?!?!) and I really need to see a win before I consider anything. The losses have been so disappointing that I cannot see myself shelling out that kind of coin for more of the same. I’d rather go to the Nintendo store and buy swag.
2. It is worth noting that in Madden I added three buffed out made up players and Jarvis Landry to the lineup and the squad still couldn’t do better than 9-7. Hot mess.

I don’t think I can watch football anymore. The joy once associated with the sport has become a sad sad feeling normally associated with Cubs fans of yesteryear. In short, there is no hope.

Football is a game of promise. On any given Sunday my team can go out there and compete with any other team and give us a win from time to time. Sadly, that is not the case. When I watch the Giants I no longer feel hope. I am waiting to be disappointed. There is no joy in waiting for that. I feel the way Charlie Brown should feel when running towards that ball. He knows she is going to pull it away, yet he tries anyway.

When you know something is destined to disappoint and hurt you there is absolutely no reason to continue down that path. Unless sadness, disappointment, and hurt is what you came for in the first place.

This is where we get into the Cubs fans. Cubbies harbored a sense of hope. There was a slim belief that they could turn things around and be successful. For others there was the fun of the game event itself. They thrived in the moment, despite the certain pain and disappointment that followed.

That is not where I’m at. I am in a place of hurt and disappointment and no longer believing at all. I’m the butt of the jokes and not at all laughing. So, I’m done.