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Find a Moment of Fun

September 27, 2018 //
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I’m laughing. It’s still morning. I’m barely awake.

(I don’t actually really laugh, out loud, like, actually laughing laughing very often at all, and most often when I do it is at that ragged edge of hysteria, so this, for me is a real treat, to be just laughing, quite wholesomely and happily, with real delight.)

Still chuckling – over a website. A shopping website, in fact. An online point of sale for merchandise. No kidding. https://dicksbymail.com/ I stumbled on it as a link in a post in my feed this morning; not an ad, just a friend’s picture (I think… It’s getting harder to tell, more often).

Still laughing.

Yeah, there are definitely one or two folks in recent memory I would delightedly tell to “eat a bag of dicks”. Omg – and maybe I could send something “tasteful” to the Whitehouse? 😀

Still sitting here grinning and feeling quite alive and merry. It’s a good feeling. Go get some! 🙂

Humor –  amusement – is a wonderful way to connect with people, and enjoy a shared moment (don’t be mean, that shit’s not actually funny, and you could break someone’s heart with that). I feel light and relieved of stress and hopeful… and merry. “Merry” may be one of my favorite emotions; as with contentment, it’s one that can be worked at quite directly with good success. Life feeling, in turns, quite content, and quite merry, would be amazing – even if I never actually felt something I would be inclined to call “happy”.

The resulting feeling of hopefulness and being uplifted is a great start to a new day. I think I’ll make my new beginning right here. 😀

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being

One Very Good Day

September 26, 2018 //
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Yesterday was a good one. Productive at work, minimum hassles, an easy commute in both directions, a comfortably chill evening that was also an evening on which I got a few things done; it was lovely.

I sit sipping my coffee and considering it, smiling, feeling content. It’s not that it’s some specific requirement to give yesterday more time, today; it’s just a great practice to make time to savor good moments. Doing so regularly has the power to slowly rewire my brain to be more easily able to bounce back from stress, to live in the context of implicit recollection (and limited certainty) that more difficult moments will be quite temporary, and that life is, generally, good. I have found it a highly effective practice, and along with practicing explicit willful gratitude, it is a practice that has taken me a long way from those dark days, well behind me now, of being mired in past trauma and present stress.

The day begin most delightfully with a ludicrously easy commute. I hit all the lights green. There just wasn’t anyone in front of me. It was… relaxed. There was that big full moon in the sky. It was quite pleasant and utterly stress free. I got into the office, got the work day started, and noticed that big beautiful moon sinking low over the city. I made time for that moment, right then and there, and alerted a camera-toting coworker of the opportunity to grab a couple cool city shots, each of us, sharing that experience with each other. It was fun. A great way to take a break.

One lovely moment. One beautiful city.

The day continued from that point, a series of moments, a series of opportunities, a series of choices. It was a very good day. The evening, and even the commute home, was equally pleasant, and, yes, productive. I managed to get a few things done before yielding to fatigue and arthritis pain, and those things were more merely the end of a day, than any hardship. Balance. It was… worth remembering. 🙂

So, I sit here with my coffee smiling. One nice thing about such an extraordinarily pleasant day? I experienced that, which means it can occur, and if it can occur, and has occurred at least once previously, it could occur again, making it all quite possible. I like that idea. 🙂 It wholly undermines that annoying experience that is characteristic of despair – the feeling that nothing good can come of anything we say or do, and that only bad outcomes truly exist, and well, fuck… then why bother, at all, it’s only misery and more misery, anyway? Yeah. Not pleasant. Also – not true. 😀 I can do better.

I notice the time. I finish my coffee. The day awaits, and it is time to begin again. 😀

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Categories Allegories, art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, Despair, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, The Big 5

Software Upgrade – It’s Banned Books Week!

September 25, 2018 //
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Hey, don’t forget to upgrade your software. You know we become what we practice, sure, but don’t forget we can upgrade our own software anytime – through the magic of reading! It’s true. It’s even a wonderful time for it; it’s Banned Books Week!

If you’ve been following along, you’ve already watched this video, and maybe you’re also experiencing some difficulty getting into a book (and maybe you remember when it was much much easier to do)… It’s not too late to take back your attention span. It’s going to take practice, and it’s going to take a very specific new beginning. Are you ready for it? Here’s how it works:

  1. Turn off your device, or at least silence your notifications.
  2. Pick up a book.
  3. Begin reading.
  4. Keep reading.
  5. Go back to reading.
  6. Seriously, are you not reading?
  7. READ!

Yep. It’s that easy. 😉

If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of lists you can start with… here. Here. Here. Over here, too. One thing there is no shortage of? Books. Read some!

The ease and convenience of the Internet is no substitution for learning a subject with depth, or enjoying a long involved tale, or riding the emotional roller-coaster of poetry. Kind of a similar magnitude of difference as between “small talk” and deeply intimate conversations, actually. No need to coast through your existence being unimaginably facile, though; books exist (and so do deeply intimate conversations between very authentic people).

I’ve got a stack of books that I’ve not yet read.

Books, rather pleasantly, also give one time to soak things in, and give full consideration to new learning – no rushing necessary. I often set one aside and come back to it with greater appreciation or understanding, or having taken time to cross-reference a point that needed some clarification (or just to look up a word I didn’t understand in that context). Books don’t “turn it into an argument” if I disagree, either, they just wait for me to turn the page and learn more, which may broaden my perspective.

…You may be getting the impression I’m a huge fan of reading. 🙂 I am. It’s true. It’s a thing. I love to read.

I don’t read as much as I once did. Internet. I can clearly correlate the decline in my reading to the increase in my time online. Huh. I bet my software is way out of date as a result. It’s time to upgrade!

It’s time to begin again.

What are you reading?

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Logic & Reason, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, Words

The Sound of the Rain

September 23, 2018 //
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I woke to the sound of rainfall this morning. I didn’t realize it when I woke. It was an early-but-counts-as-sleeping-in-anyway sort of time. I stumbled to the bathroom to pee, took my morning medication, and went back to bed intent on sleeping in “for real”…

…Then I heard the rain falling. I expected it to rock me to sleep, most delightfully. It did not. lol Not this morning. I contentedly lay there wrapped in comfort, listening to the rain fall. I listened to a gentle patter on the window panes. I listened to a drenching downpour that lasted only minutes. I listened to the characteristic rustling of wet Big Leaf Maple leaves, tossed in the pre-dawn stormy breeze. I lay there in the darkness, listening, smiling, resting. I wasn’t sleeping though, and the inevitable did happen; I got up for coffee. lol

An autumn morning before dawn.

I “lit a fire” in the fireplace as I headed to the kitchen, to take the early morning chill off the room, feeling exceedingly grateful to have a gas fireplace. I’m okay with trading the scent of a wood fire for the cleanliness and ease of use of the gas fireplace. 🙂 It’s autumn. Yesterday was the Equinox. It seems only fitting to enjoy warming my toes by the fire with a fresh cup of coffee on quiet fall Sunday morning.

Don’t forget to embrace simple pleasures, and savor moments of joy and contentment that aren’t expensive or flashy. 🙂 There’s much in life to be enjoyed, even in the depths of great misery, and it make so much difference to our experience of “quality of life”.

I sip my coffee and contemplate the day ahead. I settle on a plan of housekeeping, garden work, and find myself content to keep the day simple and purposeful. I’ll finish here, and the day will be spent off-line, engaged in needful tasks, and present in my life. (Oh, there’ll be verbs involved; I’m a human primate, and it will require effort not to return to the internet, again and again, but I’ve got self-care needs on this one. I want my attention span back.)

Have you considered this? How much you, too, may need your attention span back? We become what we practice.

It’s time to begin, again.

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Mindfulness, Moments, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being

No FOMO

September 22, 2018 //
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You’re going to miss out on some things. Trust me. It’s unavoidable. You’ll miss cool shit happening you just didn’t know about, and things that you thought you could do some other time, but never did. You’ll find yourself exhausted, over-committed, distracted, or overcome by circumstances and miss out on some amazing experience. It’s going to happen. There is no preventing it, or planning it away. No amount of scrolling through feeds, or staring blankly into the gaping maw of the internet will prevent you missing out on things. The human experience is just that fucking vast, and even if, somehow, our lifetimes were long enough to do everything, go everywhere, meet everyone; we could never spend that lifetime experiencing what has gone past and is no more. So… get over it. No fear of missing out; you’re going to miss out.

I watched this yesterday. I hope you watch it today.

Reflect on it, if you can hold your own attention long enough to do so.

The way we use the internet is changing who we are. Maybe that’s unavoidable, too. I know I scroll through my feed too many times, too often, too much of the time, and many more times than is required to read what matters to me.

I need to be outside more, out in the trees. I need to be in my garden, and out on the trail. I need to turn the tv off more often, for longer, and silence the background noise for more hours of my day. I have books to read and miles to walk. My “inner voice” has been raising hell about this with me for a while now.

No matter how many times I check for messages, scroll through a feed, read the news, or use the internet to explore or plan life, it’s not time spent living life. I’m not missing out on less by being so “connected” – I’m missing out on more.

Have we had this conversation before? (Probably. It seems likely… this has been on my mind, off and on, since I first noticed a specific change in my cognition and preferences; I now find it hard to choose to watch a movie, and favor much shorter content instead, day-to-day. The linked video really resonated with me, because of this particular change.)

Not one of my most precious memories, or noteworthy experiences, of the past years have been things that “happened” online. Not one. I’m just saying… what is most memorable for me, personally, are moments in life, not online.

Am I who I most want to be, making use of the amazing technology that connects us all, in quite the way I do? Can I do better? What does that look like? What practices would that involve? Is it something to change – or would I be fighting evolution and progress… a curmudgeon… a dinosaur?

First thing this morning, I looked at my Facebook feed before I did anything else. That’s some shit that’s going to stop right now. lol I know. I’ve said as much before, have I not? (I have.) That’s how I know it will need practice, and that there will be verbs involved. It’s time to change – because there are changes I want to make. It’s time to sort out what those need to be.

It’s time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, Uncategorized
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