In the early pages of The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee’s notes are quoted thus:

Understanding oneself happens through a process of relationships and not through isolation.

While I see some truth in that, I think I also need a balance of relationships and isolation.  Solitude is really what I mean:  I need times of solitude.  I never got why Superman needed a Fortress of Solitude, but something really clicked for me this morning:  remember the part in the most recent “gritty reboot” movie, where Superman takes Lois way up into the stratosphere and they can hear all the voices of the world crying for help and whatnot?  All of a sudden, the whole Fortress of Solitude thing really made sense:  it’s a place he can go where he can enjoy the silence – regroup, consolidate, become one with himself again.  Then he’s able to go back out and face the help-crying voices again.

I had a busy day yesterday, and some of that busy-ness overlapped the times during the day I routinely have to myself.  I met a mentor for lunch; normally I sit by myself in the cafeteria and read while I eat.  I had to run home to let Christine and the cat into my apartment because the door I had left open for the PSE&G guy was closed by said guy; I had just sat down to eat dinner and read at Whole Foods.  So I had to take my dinner to my next appointment and wolf it down there.  While I was eating, a friend of mine was leaning over into my face/food space, wondering what I was eating.  She got too close and I snapped at her like a starved dog, “get the fuck away from my food, woman.”  Whoa.  I apologized quickly, but the damage was done.

As I’m sure you know all too well, dear reader, I’ve been alone for quite some time now.  I know that I’ve come to enjoy it, but I what I did not realize (at least not so overtly) until last night was that I’ve come to depend upon solitude.  I need it.  If I don’t have at least short periods of being alone with myself, time to collect and regroup, I may as well be carrying kryptonite around in my pocket. 

I think it may be time for some sort of retreat for me.  Solo hiking or getting engrossed in a novel for a few hours are usually my preferred means of solitude:  maybe I’ll take a day off work next week and burn some miles and climb some mountains by myself.  This weekend is already booked with group hikes.

So yeah: 

Dear Bruce Lee,

Don’t go forgetting about balance.  It’s the yin that defines the yang – the solitude that defines the isolation. 

See also melissa’s Tao Te Ching reference in her comment to yesterday’s post.

Sincerely,

Ted

So I’ve been re-reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the last couple of weeks.  I’ve been reading John Galt’s speech to the world for the past few days – it’s like forever long, just like I remember it.  I think the book would be much better if it were maybe 20% as long as it is.  Well over 50 pages, I think.

Anyway, I had a conversation with my coworker this afternoon that could have been part of the book:

For the last six weeks or so, Kerry and I have been working from some rented office space in Lyndhurst (next door to the firm at which we used to work, which is kind of ironic).  The space we’re renting is in the offices of a small-time staffing agency:  their main client is the call center at our old firm.  The agency doesn’t deal with high-class staffing projects; they basically just supply warm bodies.  The agency has two full-time employees and I think they both make a decent living.  Yesterday and today they held a “job fair” (advertised on craigslist) and the calibre of applicants has been characteristically low.

Kerry turned to me and said something along the lines of “I feel really bad for the middle-aged people who come in to interview for such crappy jobs, don’t you?”  And I replied, “yeah, I suppose, but not really.”  Kerry then told me I’m a heartless robot, which I took as a compliment, given the nature of the message of the book I’m currently reading.  The successful entrepreneurs and captains of industry in Atlas Shrugged are described almost word-for-word in the same manner by the looters.

I’m not calling Kerry a looter by any stretch – she’s a hard worker and doesn’t ask for any favors, which I appreciate (and is the main reason why I enjoy working with her).

My feeling on the unfortunate situation of the overqualified middle-agers applying for $13/hour call center jobs is certainly one of empathy, but it’s a short-lived empathy:  there’s nothing I can do about it, so I don’t see any reason to feel it more than in passing.  The feelings that matter to me are the actionable ones:  feelings I can do something about.  There’s nothing I can do to help those people.  And, on the flip side of the Golden Rule coin, were I in their shoes, I wouldn’t expect anything in particular from me.

***   ***   ***

My dreams last night were strange.  In the first one (that I can remember), I was at my parents’ house and they were moving away – joining a cult or something.  My brother was going with them and I think my sister was on the fence.  I was all over their house and property, trying to convince them that they had things of value that they couldn’t just leave behind.  They were like “take anything you want; we’re outta here.”  There was a HUGE old sailboat of dramatically strange and appropriately surreal proportions that my sister and I discussed using to get away from whatever evil it was that had taken over my family (and the rest of the families on the block – probably even the whole town/county/area as well).

I remember going back and forth between trying to convince my family that they were making a mistake  and digging through their stuff, looking for a stash of gold or something that I could take.  So I was halfway hopeful and halfway resigned to them leaving on their fatal fool’s errand.

I don’t really remember what happened, only that I had this profound sense of evil – enough so that I eventually woke myself up to get away from the feeling (I more or less knew I was dreaming the whole time).  I spent the next few minutes awake in my bed, partly waiting for the feeling to pass and partly trying to let enough time go by so that I wouldn’t re-enter that particular dream.

My ex-wife was in another dream later that night/morning.  I saw her across the stage:  she was walking towards me and greeting me as though we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time.  It was very strange.  I think I reluctantly observed the forms, but I knew that her whole comportment was a facade.  This is not to say that she was concealing any enmity towards me:  the facade merely covered blankness.

This second part is relatively easy to interpret:  the possibility of contact with my ex-wife came up in an email conversation (with someone else) last week, and I was looking at some pictures on facebook of a friend we have in common (also last week) – I declined to comment on the pics because of the possibility of accidental contact with my ex-wife.

Now, I don’t have any particular ex-wife fear-of-contact issues, but I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to set the stage for the possibility.  I have no desire to see her or speak to her again – which is not to say that it will never happen.  So that’s that for that part of the weirdo dreams.

The thing with my family is also not-so out of the blue:  everyone works together at the family business and business isn’t all that great.  My younger brother and sister are both adults, but they’re also the children in that extended multi-person relationship, so decisions are being made for them that they really should be making themselves, and that’s perfectly natural for the overall relationship.  The thing is, I don’t think that this is right – I don’t think it should be perfectly natural for the overall relationship.  I don’t think it’s particularly healthy.  I won’t get into the specifics here, but that’s the evil that I felt bubbling up from within me during the dream.

So, to bring this full-circle:  it’s pretty easy for me to let the unactionable empathy I feel for the overqualified middle-agers pass quickly by, but when my heart goes out to my family members, it’s a bit harder to let go.  My empathy is only relatively unactionable:  I can take my sister out to eat or to a concert or something, but I can’t give her a higher paying job.  Nor can I buy her a house or pay off the note on her car.  But still, I feel like I should be able to, and that’s the frustrating part – the feeling that I can’t (or won’t) let pass over and through me.

I suppose I’ll have to dwell on this some more – because thinking solves problems, right?

Yes, yes, I know, dear reader:  it’s been quite a long time since my last post.

A lot’s been going on lately and I’ve mostly been keeping to myself.  Oh, I’ve been talking to people here and there about things, and it’s not that I didn’t feel comfortable talking to you about them, dear reader, but, well, I haven’t felt comfortable talking to you about them.

I quit my job on Thursday.  Scratch that – I ‘resigned’ on Thursday:  handed my boss my resignation letter at the end of the day.  I had to go into the office for a bit on Friday, I suppose to bring closure, though there wasn’t really anything for me to do.  Everything I’d been working on had been tied off or handed off in the past week or so.  I think my boss saw it coming, but I don’t think he was expecting it – if that makes sense.

I’m starting at a new firm soon.  It’s a start-up, and I’ll be in on the ground floor.  Several of my colleagues from the old firm are already there and I’m excited to work with them again – they’re the ones from the old firm who actually worked.

I’ve known for several weeks that I’d be moving firms, but couldn’t really tell anyone at the old place until I’d squared away all my stuff.  The last few weeks have been torturous for me:  I’ve not been sleeping well and my self-doubt has been at the forefront of my thinking.

After I resigned on Thursday night, and knowing that I’d have to go into the office on Friday and face everyone, I went to see Inception with my sister Katie.  It was pretty good, though I think it could have been much better.  At least it was entertaining and got me out of my head for those few hours before I went to bed.

And, it helped me realize that I’d been spending so much (too much) time in my head lately.  Mostly falling prey to my self-doubt and thinking along pessimistic lines.  I don’t mean to say that I’ve stopped all that and have reverted to a pollyannaish outlook, but rather that the movie helped me become aware of just how much time I’d spent concocting possible future scenarios in my imagination – and negative ones, at that.

Not blogging about my thoughts and feelings on the whole scenario was tough but necessary.  There are one or two people with whom I work who know about this site and I couldn’t risk letting any of my plans become public knowledge at work.

Special thanks to Jen, Heather, Anna and Didi for talking with me via email about what’s been going on in my head.

I’m still a bit nervous for the future, but I’m also confident that I can handle whatever comes.  I’m excited in a subdued fashion to see how things unfold over the next few weeks.  I just re-read Sun Tzu’s Art of War and am currently reading both Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity and Bruce Lee’s The Tao of Jeet Kune Do.  I think I’m going to read a few books on military history, in order to have some practical examples to which I can relate the aphorisms from Art of War.

Game on.

I recently posted a link to this speech on my facebook page, but I think the Andy Shepherd (Michael Douglas) speech from The American President is definitely something worth posting in its entirety. I scraped it from here, and if you follow that linq, I believe you can actually watch the video from the movie itself.  If you haven’t seen the movie, some of the references may not be as powerful.  The overall message, however, rarely fails to bring a tear to my eye.

Reporter: Robyn, will the President ever respond to Senator Rumson’s question about being a member of the American Civil Liberties Union?

President Shepherd: Yes, he will. Good morning. [Members of the White House Press Corps begin to rise] It’s alright. Please keep your seats. Good morning.

For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being President of this country was, to a certain extent, about character. And although I’ve not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I have been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being President of this country is entirely about character.

For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, but the more important question is “Why aren’t you, Bob?” Now this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the constitution? Now if you can answer that question, folks, then you’re smarter than I am, because I didn’t understand it until a few hours ago.

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.

Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

I’ve known Bob Rumson for years. And I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it!

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, and you wave an old photo of the President’s girlfriend and you scream about patriotism. You tell them she’s to blame for their lot in life. And you go on television and you call her a whore.

Sydney Ellen Wade has done nothing to you, Bob. She has done nothing but put herself through school, represent the interests of public school teachers, and lobby for the safety of our natural resources. You want a character debate, Bob? You better stick with me, ’cause Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league.

I’ve loved two women in my life. I lost one to cancer. And I lost the other ’cause I was so busy keeping my job, I forgot to do my job. Well, that ends right now.

Tomorrow morning the White House is sending a bill to Congress for it’s consideration. It’s White House Resolution 455, an energy bill requiring a twenty percent reduction of the emission of fossil fuels over the next ten years. It is by far the most aggressive stride ever taken in the fight to reverse the effects of global warming. The other piece of legislation is the crime bill. As of today, it no longer exists. I’m throwing it out. I’m throwing it out and writing a law that makes sense. You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and hand guns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.

We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you’d better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card. If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up. This a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up.

My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I AM the President.

On the ride up to RI at the beginning of my MINIs on Top trip, I popped into my CD player a series of CDs my friend Jason loaned to me two or three years ago:  it was a talk by Eckhart Tolle called The Flowering of Human Consciousness.  It was pretty good – both for the content and because it took my mind away from the traffic of the drive.

For my trip this past weekend, I bought Tolle’s first book The Power of Now on CD to listen to on the longer sections of the drive.  I got through about half of it and am looking forward to another long drive as an opportunity to finish it.

I’m not really one for books-on-tape (I prefer paper), but I don’t think I’d read Tolle’s book even if I bought it – or I’d probably put it down halfway through.  But Tolle has an interesting enough voice (he speaks the Queen’s English with a German accent), and I find this kind of material to be better transmitted through the spoken word than in print.

Tolle’s main thesis isn’t all that different (and, to his credit, he admits as much) from what various spiritual teachers have been saying for pretty much millennia:  that all we have is this moment – there is no past and no future, and thus no point in spending time living in either.  That we must be completely present in the now in order to live a complete and fulfilling life.

He talks about transcendence and enlightenment as well, but these are relatively foreign concepts to me and while they seem nice to think about as ideals, they’re not part of my everyday life.  I dig the fact that he brings an element of everyday life to his spiritual teachings.

I’m not going to go all starry-eyed for the guy, but I can get with many parts of what he says.  I think I most identify when he relates things to zen and yogic teachings.

Anyway, listening to this was an excellent set-up for my vacation:  it reminded me to stay in the moment.  I did so as much as possible and doing so played an integral role in the fulfillment I received while I was in the woods.

I have plenty more to say on this topic, but I think that’s enough for now.

Some days I feel like this:

Two waster kids stopped in front of Quinn, who grinned in welcome. “I haven’t had sex for ages,” Quinn said. He looked straight at the one wearing the T-shirt. “So I think I’ll fuck you first tonight.”

The waster kid snarled, and threw a punch with all the strength his inflated muscles could manage. Quinn remained perfectly still. The fist struck his jaw, just to the left of his chin. There was a crunch which could easily be heard above the traffic’s clamour. the waster kid bellowed, first in shock, then in agony. His whole body shook as he slowly pulled his hand back. Every knuckle was broken, as if he had punched solid stone. He cradled it with frightened tenderness, whimpering.

“I’d like to say take me to your leader,” Quinn said, as if he hadn’t even noticed the punch. “But organising yourselves takes brains. So I guess I’m out of luck.”

Hamilton, Peter F. The Naked God (2000, Orbit/Hatchette Book Group), p. 89.

Today is one of those days.

Quinn, by the way, is a skinny white dude in a priest’s get-up.

Today I spent a little bit of time checking on my ego.  My head can get blown up pretty quickly if I’m not careful.  Egomania has caused me a lot of problems in the past (in retrospect – it’s not something I really noticed at the time), and I’ve expended a lot of effort trying to gain in humility.  Without necessarily going in the ‘humiliation’ direction, if you know what I mean.

If you don’t, that means that I don’t find it to be a very productive ego-deflation exercise to tell myself I’m a piece of sh*t.  That’s a crappy way to try to get to a state of balance.

Rather, I prefer more positive ego-deflation:  asking the opinions of others (ideally, before I act) – people I trust, mind you.  Then weighing their opinions against my initial impulse and trying to plot the course of least spiritual/moral/interpersonal-relationship-related resistance.  I try to do this especially in times when I think I know exactly what I’m doing or what the next step is.  It’s when I don’t want to ask someone else what they think I should do that I need to do so the most.

For the most part, my eventual decision isn’t necessarily all that much different from my initial impulse.  However, taking the time to consider my options and the possible outcomes is incredibly valuable.  Receiving and considering the opinions of others with regard to my future actions also gives me additional considerations I’d not thought about before.

For example, a hiking analogy:

If I’m bushwhacking (hiking somewhere through the woods where there isn’t a marked trail), and I pass another hiker along the way, I’ll say “I’m going to get to the top of the mountain via such-and-such a route”.  And they’ll say “I’ve been that way before; it’s a lot shorter, but watch out for the stinging nettles”.  Or they’ll say “nobody goes that way; everybody approaches from the north – it might be longer, but there’s a herd path about halfway up that you can’t miss – I’ve also heard that the climbing gets pretty technical just before the summit”.  Some will imply that I’m an idiot for choosing that route, but I usually ignore them.

In the first two cases, however, I received additional information I hadn’t had before:  the nettles might make the going slower, and not necessarily worth it if I’m in a hurry or really don’t feel like getting all scratched up that day.  Or I might be looking for more of a mindless workout than an exercise in daytime land navigation, which makes the prospect of a herd path much more ideal.

A herd path, by the way, is basically an unmarked and unmaintained trail – enough people use that route (hence the “herd”) that it’s pretty easy to follow.  Herd paths grow up to be trails.

If it’s the winter time and there’s fresh snow on the mountain, anything is better than breaking trail – following other snowshoe prints is always easier and faster – no matter how convoluted the trail.

Even if I choose not to take the advice of those who have gone before me, at least I know what to expect:  nettles and/or some (possibly frightening and dangerous) hands-and-feet climbing.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday and today asking the opinions of others before taking action.  That means I wrote draft emails and sent them to people with a prefix of “what do you think?”  For the most part, I made the changes they suggested, while still getting across the point I wanted to.  In a couple of cases, I found that the readers misinterpreted what I was trying to say, so I had to re-word a few sections to properly make my point.

For one such email, I basically told the client that no, we’re not going to drop our fee, especially when you’re (now also) asking us to do additional work.  I sent the draft to the owner of my company and he said “go for it – you’re free to make the decisions.”  Which was pretty scary, because the client could very well read my email and decide to part company with us on this project.  I received the owner’s email while I was driving home and was like “oh shit”.  I turned the radio in my car off and checked my ego:

Things have been going pretty smoothly for me at work lately – by which I mean, things have been going my way.  People have been taking my suggestions and implement my plans.  That feels good, but my tendency is toward egomania, which means that after a couple of successful meetings, I figure I’m the man and should be running shiz from here to Timbuktu.  Not a good way for Ted to think.

So I spent some time this evening driving home with the radio off and looking at my actions and decisions over the past couple of weeks (while things have been going well and people have been taking my advice).  And do you know what I found?

I skimmed right over everything and basically said “yeah, I’m good – I’ve been making the right decisions”.

Which, in theory, doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.  Later on this evening, I realized that I was kind of scared to really look at my decisions and actions – afraid that I’d find selfish motives and other ego-based stuff.  Whether these things are actually present or not, I don’t know – the point is that that fear is not a good thing for me to have.  The fear of finding bad motives behind my actions, that is.

As far as fear goes, I really don’t have any right now – in a prospective sense.  My fear is all retrospective.  Did I fuck up?  Did I act from a poor motive and possibly hurt someone’s feelings or make a wrong choice somewhere along the line?

Again, whether I did fuck up or make bad decisions isn’t the problem here:  it’s my fear of looking at the past.  There’s nothing I can do about finding those things – they’re either there or they’re not.

I need to spend a bit of time in retrospective meditation in order to conquer this fear.  Otherwise, I might continue to fuck up and make poor decisions, while glossing them over with what I believe to be acceptable results.

I don’t really think I’ve fucked up or made bad decisions, but I still need to take some inventory and keep an eye out for the crappy items I have in stock so that I can trash them, instead of carrying them around with me.

NB:  I don’t think that spending some time in retrospective meditation is inconsistent with staying in the moment – as long as I’m in the moment when I do so.

As you may or may not know, my daily morning reading/meditation comes from my Zen-a-Day calendar.  I’ve ripped off plenty of those pages on plenty of these here pages already.  Yesterday’s reading was as follows:

A tea master asked his son to rake the leaves in the temple garden.  When the boy was finished, the tea master did not approve.  The boy then returned to the garden and took great care to rake it again, so thoroughly that not one leaf or twig remained.  Still the tea master did not approve.  The boy was baffled, not knowing what else he could do.  The tea master stepped into the garden and shook a tree, allowing a few autumn leaves to drift down upon the immaculately swept grounds.

Aside from the nice visual created in my mind, I’m not so sure how well this jives with my current understanding of Zen Buddhism.  I suppose I’m cultivating more of an active-zen than anything else right now, which is why the note I placed on the calendar leaf this morning was “zen as an ‘art’ concept ≠ zen itself.”

I think society’s current understanding of Zen is more as it relates to visual experiences than anything else.  We see a spartan room with one (or a few) carefully placed objects and say “that’s very zen”.

Caveat:  I am not a Zen Buddhist monk, nor has my study of Zen Buddhism been what one might call exhaustive.  I’ve read a bunch of things and can only give you my impression of what Zen means.  I am by no means an expert.  Though perhaps I am.

It doesn’t really matter anyway – the concept of ‘expertise’ doesn’t really fit in with Zen anyway, I think.

This is my third year with the Zen-a-Day calendar.  So far, there have been few repetitions, for which I’m thankful.  So to get back to what I wanted to say in the first place:

For me, zen (not much point in capitalizing) is, to a certain extent, about stripping things of their perceptual accoutrement, but it’s also about those perceptions themselves.  They’re all we have.  Zen is about the moment.  While my perceptions in this moment are unavoidably shaped by the past (perceptions in other moments), the past isn’t now.  And zen is about the now.

So, insofar as the reading placed a pleasant image in my head for a moment, it’s that moment that’s the bit of zen, not the characteristics of the image itself – a few scattered autumn leaves on a pristine bit of ground.

My plan was to test out this new plugin with a post this afternoon – er, yesterday afternoon, as it’s now 13 minutes into tomorrow.  But I didn’t get a chance to.  Work was crazy busy today and I left feeling like I still have a million things to do.  Which isn’t true:  I only have a handful and the projects I’m working on are (so far) well in hand (pun).

When I jumped over to Lauren Flax’s blog via my Outlook feed this afternoon, I scrolled down to leave a comment and saw that I already had – but it was a comment I left on her facebook page.  I was all like “wtf?  How tf did that happen?”  (I say f a lot – in my head.)  So I went to Lauren’s facebook page (yeah, we’re cool like that) and clicked on her latest post.  It brought me right to her blog.  If you click on the link to one of my posts – via my fb page (“Notes”) or via The Quixotic Jedi Fan Page – you get either the “Note” version of one of these here blog posts, or you get kind of a window on this here actual page, basically enveloped by the Networked Blogs facebook page.  So people (that’s you, dear reader) read my posts on facebook, but not HERE.  WTFrig.  So I installed the Wordbooker plugin (just like Lauren).  Total fb-integration (if I want).

So yeah, we’re (that’s you & me, dear reader) taking this pig out for a test-drive.  Let me know what happens or if anything goes wrong or seems annoying – such as double-posting on fb.  Your fb-comments will (read: should, if I set the damned thing up right) migrate over here, and vice-versa.

*  *  *

I was talking to my buddy Mike this evening – he turned 63 last Monday – about gratitude.  About how that feeling of gratitude is something that can be practiced.  What I mean is that it’s like meditation:  finding the void is hard at first – it’s slippery and seems impossible to hold onto.  Until, of course, I let go.

After enough practice, I can slide into that void pretty much any time I like.  The world can be chaos around me – and I can be all kinds of caught up in that chaos – but (if I remember to do it) I can let go of it all and find the void – that calm in the storm.

Gratitude is the same way.  Even when I’m feeling like a total piece of sh*t, self-pity verily oozing out of every pore, if I remember to be grateful (even for something small), I can get right back to that overall feeling of gratitude.  Like the void, I become a channel again, instead of a vessel.

At this point in our discussion, Mike got a bit animated and said “yeah, it’s just like remembering what it was like to be in love all over again.”  And I was like “sh*t”.  Only I said it with the ‘i’ in the middle (no pun).

I don’t remember what it feels like to be in love.  I can remember that I was in love, but I can’t replicate the feeling.  Maybe ‘replicate’ is the wrong word.  It’s more like I can’t empathize with myself.  Or, rather, my former self.

Oh, I can remember (sort of) the time in my life when I was in love – and I define being “in love” as a two-way street:  it doesn’t work one way – that’s more of an infatuation thing.  But I can’t remember what it feels like.  I remember feeling grounded – that as long as I had that love, anything could go wrong and I’d be ok.  I suppose I felt ‘complete’, but again, I’m not sure that’s the right word.

It’s like I’m forced to play the tape all the way through:  that beginning period of hanging out with my (ex-)wife which morphed into courtship, and then the time after the “I-dos” – all of it flows inexorably into the heartbreak and heartache of the end.

Don’t get me wrong here, dear reader:  I’m not crying on my keyboard right now or anything.  I suppose the flip side of the “holy sh*t, call the wa-aaaambulance – I can’t remember what it feels like to be in love” coin is that neither can I feel that most vicious and ubiquitous of pains I felt at the end.

Verily, I could probably go digging around in my mind/soul/whatever for a fingerful of that ambrosia that love was, but then I’d also be left with the tainted aftertaste.  I’ll pass, thankyouverymuch.

All that said, I feel pretty complete right now.  (Knock on wood) I’m pretty sure that if anything goes wrong, I’ll be ok.  Being able to find gratitude (if I can remember to do it) is part of that, and it’s pretty sweet.

I finished my peaks today for my Catskill 3500 Club winter patch.  A total of 28 mountains climbed this winter.  I met three guys as I was just about to the summit of Eagle and we shot the shit for a bit before I headed out ahead of them.  After I hit the summit and saw them again on the way down, they all congratulated me (complete with fist bumps – or “daps” as they say in Britain).

Thing is, today was just another day on the mountain for me.  I didn’t have any kind of crazy feeling of elation when I hit the summit of Eagle, and frankly didn’t even realize that I had completed my goal until these guys reminded me.  Kinda weird.  I really hope I don’t get into one of those “I just don’t know what to do with myself” funks in the next week or two.  I need to find myself a new goal and start planning for that soon, I think.

I’m tired from hiking yesterday and today (7.2 and 8 miles, respectively), and I just barely got my laundry done, cake baked, dinner made and tally sheet ready to be mailed, so I’m off to bed shortly.  I’ll talk more about this weekend’s hikes and the completion of my winter peakbagging extravaganza tomorrow.  I’ll also figure out how to post my pics, vids and maps sometime this week.

One thing that occurred to me this evening:

Once upon a time, I worked really hard to feel “full” – I took and took and took and held everything that was “mine” close, not wanting to let anyone else have it.  I just noticed it, but I’ve been grooving on the “he who says does not know; he who knows does not say” (Lao Tsu) vibe for quite a while now.  Which is to say that I’ve been keeping my mouth shut and listening to other people (whether or not they’re just talking a bunch of bull), rather than trying to tell everyone all about what I’m doing or what I think.

I’m finding that I feel more “full” the more I continue to empty myself out.  I get more fulfillment out of being a channel than being a vessel – I’m constantly being emptied and filled at the same time.  It’s almost like being at one with the Universe.

Yes, I know it’s been nearly a week since my last post, but I have a good excuse:

I’ve only had the use of my left eye since Saturday, and until yesterday, my right eye was in quite a lot of pain.

(Skip to around 1:23, please.)

Saturday’s hike was Doubletop and Graham mountains – both bushwhacks, though I started out for a short bit from the trail at the base of these two mountains.  I summited Doubletop and struck off for Graham.  Graham was truly a mountain-climbing experience:  there was a lot of snow on the ground and the climb was steep.  Lots of hands-and-feet work – in the sport, I suppose we’d call it “technical” (though not to the point where I really needed ropes and ice axes).  My snowshoes stood me in good stead for the whole trip.

About a hundred yards or so from the summit of Graham (on the way back to the trailhead), I got popped in the eye by a tree branch, and the day’s fun ended.  I spent the last mile and a half or two miles of the bushwhack with my right eye closed and in quite a lot of pain (see above), stopping every hundred yards or so to wait for the latest wave of acid-burn pain to wash over my eye, and/or attempting to flush out whatever debris might have still been stuck in there with water from my near-frozen water bottle.

At the end of the day, the flushing process didn’t really do more than take up extra time and possibly numb my eye – the NP at the emergency room later told me that there wasn’t anything in my eye:  that an abraded cornea feels like there’s something there, though.  I prefer to think that my body responded to my vocal request to “just digest the fucking thing, if you’re not going to flush it out (I’m sure there’s some protein in there somewhere).”

In the spirit of gratitude, this was also running through my mind.

The nice thing about the whole experience was that I was able to stay in the moment (though they were not exactly the moments in which I preferred to be) and not panic.  I stayed off the near-frozen river, as much as the land wanted to push me in that direction, and I didn’t freak out when it started to get dark (that’s exactly why I carry a headlamp).  My legs carried me the last couple of miles back to the car, and I checked my map and compass regularly, in deference to my underdeveloped sense of direction.  And at no point during the whole ordeal did I wonder why god or the universe or the mountain was doing this to me.  I just accepted the state of affairs as it was and made lemonade.  Not too bad for a one-time vice president of the pessimist society.  There’s no anti-Ted conspiracy; sometimes things just suck a little more than other times.

The 8 (or so) mile drive from the trailhead back to a main road where I could flag down a cop was pretty nerve-racking, but not nearly as bad as the 40 miles from the hospital to the Thruway.  Once I got just about to the Thruway, I called my parents and asked them to come rescue me – there was no way I was going to be able to make the 2 hour drive back home with only one eye not in excruciating pain and only able to see about 40 yards anyway.  It was exactly like the worst times I’ve ever driven drunk.  I am SO glad that’s no longer part of my repertoire.

Mad props to Ed and Betsy Wallace for effecting the rescue.

Sunday and Monday were spent in and out of consciousness.  Mercifully, I don’t remember much of those days.  I do, however, remember my mother bringing me coffee and food.  Thanks Mom.  <3  =D

I saw the opthamologist on Tuesday and again on Wednesday.  He put a bunch of drops in my eyes and a patch over my injured right one both days – the patch comes off Thursday and I’ll be responsible for the application of the drops and cremes after that.  My next appointment is Friday and the doctor said I can go back to work on Monday.  Work has been pretty cool about the whole thing – I’ve never missed this much time before (though I’ve been working a bit via blackberry and cell anyway).

I now have 8 mountains to climb in my winter peakbagging extravaganza (over 5 trips), and five weekends in which to do so before March 22d.  My plan was to get a bit ahead of schedule by hiking on Monday as well, but, well, that’s fucked.

So now I’m looking at Thursday and Friday off.  I’m sorely (no pun) tempted to hike one of those days, but I don’t know that I want to be off the air blackberry-wise for that long.  I’ll be out there this Saturday, though.

I drove a bit during the day today, but that wasn’t as much fun as it usually is.  I should be good once this damned pirate-patch is off.

So now I’m looking at two days of unrequested down-time.  I really should clean my desk.

I think I’m going to be taking it easy for a little while.  I spent the first couple of weeks of the month trying to get myself back into high gear, but I think I ended up just spinning my wheels and effing up my spiritual connection.  My ego is starting to resurface.  Nothing I’ve really acted on to my detriment – yet – but I can feel myself getting close.

I was talking to my old man this evening and he analogized the part of what I was telling him to which he was actually listening to my grandfather’s bit of wisdom that it’s important to take a car out and red-line the engine every once in a while to blow out the carburetor.  You know, work out all the junk and accumulation that comes with just driving around the neighborhood.  While I think my old man probably wasn’t picking up what I was putting down, his analogy still holds.  I fully believe that it’s important to blow the engine out on a regular basis – both with my car and with myself – but it has to be done properly.  What I’ve been trying to do (back to the analogy) is red-line my engine while I’m still driving around the neighborhood.  And that’s not the best way to do it.  In fact, that’s probably the best way to throw a rod or get the engine to seize or some such other bad thing that happens to a car when you’re up- and down-shifting too much and too quickly.

Blowing the engine out means doing it on the highway – the blowout has to be sustained, or the cleaning isn’t thorough.  Revving the engine and chirping the tires around the neighborhood isn’t the answer.  Sure, drive around the neighborhood a bit to get the engine warmed up – there’s no point in blowing out a cold engine: that leads to bad stuff too.  Once it’s warm, though, it’s got to get on the highway and spend some time at speed.

I’ve been doing all the wrong things.  I can see the highway ahead of me (read:  work and life getting very busy), but I’m not there yet.  And my engine’s still cold.  I need to spend some time driving around the neighborhood – which means getting back to basics:  setting up a solid routine so that my up- and down-shifts are smooth and regular.  Once that gets comfortable, I can start to pick up some speed and push the tach a bit here and there.  Once everything’s running pretty smoothly, I’ll be able to get out there and blow out my engine – a sustained and controlled burn which can only then be truly cleansing.

That means I need to back off a bit from trying to pack too many things into my life right now.  I need to concentrate on laying down the big blocks of my schedule first.  I need to be comfortable and regular with them before I can start adding more (smaller) pieces to it.  That means regularizing my work schedule as best I can, nourishing my body on a regular basis and not killing myself every Saturday when I hike (read:  slow the pace down, Ted, it’s not a race to the summit), taking care of my evening commitments and making sure I leave myself time at the end of the day to decompress (read and meditate).

Once I’m comfortable in this schedule (which really shouldn’t take more than a couple of days), I can start to add copywriting and other things back into my evenings (slowly).  As time passes, by the time I realize I’m blowing my engine out, it’ll be one helluva fun ride.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King.

We dream your dream.

The other day, The Naked Redhead nominated me for a “Happy 101 Award” because she thought it was “hilarious to do so”.  This is kind of like a blogger chain-email thingamabob (I think).  TNR was nominated by Alex over at The Tell Tale Blog, and I was named in her post.  I think pingbacks are supposed to be involved here, but who knows whose are disabled and whose aren’t?

Anyway, here are the rules of engagement:

List 10 things that make you happy. Do at least one of them today. Tag 5 bloggers that brighten your day.

For those bloggers who get the award, you then link back to my blog and create your makes you happy list.

So needless to say I’m pretty honored that TNR named me in her post; it’s nice to be among such fine company.  I won’t mention that I’m so far the only dude I’ve seen in this love-train.  Ok, so it looks like I did just mention that.  Whatever.  Somebody’s got to represent the Y chromosome.  “Represent, reprezent-zent”, as they say in A Tribe Called Quest.

I made my list on the way to work today.  And thanks to my AyePhone, I was able to store it in my notes, instead of wrestling with pen and paper while driving.  Here’s what I came up with – and these are in no particular order:

1. Sunny Days
2. Hiking
3. Tools
4. Katie
5. Yoga
6. Meditation
7. Strong Coffee
8. Cigarettes
9. A Sense of Accomplishment
   
10. A Solid Beat
11. Friendship/Unconditional Love
12. Living Alone
    
13. Driving
14. Boobs
    
15. Paying Bills
16. Writing
17. Reading
18. Feng shui

Yes, I can count, and I know that’s not ten things.  But whatever:  I was brainstorming.

As I was going through this exercise, my thoughts turned to the nature of happiness.  What makes me happy?  Does money make me happy?  The things that money can buy me?  I don’t think so.  I think that material things in general kind of need to be excluded from the list.  For me, that is.  Because I’m a philosopher and a wordsmith and pretty anal about definitions.  And, in that spirit, for the purposes of this post, I will define something that “makes me happy” as “makes me feel good”.

So what’s happiness?  Happiness for me comes in two flavors:  overall and the short burst/realization kind.  Most of the things on the list above are basically of the latter kind – having them, being around them, or just knowing or becoming aware that they’re near is enough to create a feeling of happiness.  The overall happiness thing is a bit more slippery and tough to nail down.  Which is why I don’t think I’m going to get into it right now.  I’m not sure that – overall – I’m happy right now.  Nor am I sure that I’m not.  Maybe I’ll explore this subject another time.

This isn’t meant to be quite as heavy as I’m making it, but wtf, I’ve been having trouble uploading pictures, so I can’t post brightly-colored pics of flowers, red lipstick and nipples.

Anyway, here’s a crack at distilling the above into ten specific items, and thereby coming into conformity with the whole point of the fun:

1.  Sunny days are awesome.  They make waking up easy and I dig wearing my new shades.  Whatever it is about the sunlight hitting my retina, I’m a fan.  I don’t care if it’s cold or hot or sticky or what-have-you: if it’s sunny out, chances are I’m happy.

2.  Hiking was an easy one – but when I spent some time thinking about it, hiking doesn’t really make me “happy”.  I don’t go hiking for the sheer joy of it.  I like the sense of accomplishment I get from peakbagging.  Oh, the exercise is certainly good for me and leads to a wonderful combination of physical exhaustion and balance among my brain chemicals (and waves), but these are – again – of the short-term variety of happiness.  They are also, however, in my opinion, components of the “overall” type of happiness.  And since we’re talking about visceral things here, I’m going to go right ahead and lump boobs into this one, because they bring me a very visceral kind of happiness as well.  Or maybe I should just say the female form in general.  Mmmm.

3.  Tools make me happy.  Having the right ones for the job, etc.  My AyePhone, netbook, cordless drill, leatherman, hiking gear, and so on.  All these things give me a sense of being prepared, and they’re a joy to apply to the proper situation.

4.  Driving makes me happy.  Specifically, driving my stick-shift Mini Cooper between 60 and 90 miles per hour in moderate traffic.  Driving your car doesn’t make me happy.  I suppose this has something to do with a sense of being in control, but I don’t much feel like shrinking my own head on this one right now.  Oh, and strong coffee and cigarettes are a wonderful addition to driving.

5.  A solid beat makes me happy.  It never fails.  Preferably one seen and felt in a live environment.  Recordings are great, but actually watching an artist lay down a solid beat – whether on the drums, cello, bass or whatever – gives me a sense of participation.  In such an environment, I find it hard not to dance.

6.  I know I already mentioned a sense of accomplishment above, but I think it deserves its own number.  In fact, that number should probably be 1.  Pretty much everything that makes me happy (or “feel good”) in some way or another involves the production of a sense of accomplishment within me.  It’s definitely the #1 reason why I’m always so busy, and probably the main motivation behind just about everything I do.

7.  Yoga and meditation can go together because they’re inherently related.  Quieting my mind on a regular basis is another aspect of the elusive “overall” flavor of happiness.  And definitely something that I need more of right now.  Feng shui is also connected to this, because #7 here is as much about energy flow as anything else.

8.  My sister Katie makes me happy.  I know I’m better in small doses, which means that my doses of Katie end up being reciprocal, but that’s ok.  Reciprocal’s not the right word, but I hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

9.  Friendship and unconditional love make me happy.  Again, I think these are also components of the “overall” flavor that I’m missing in my life right now.  I don’t have very many friends – which is entirely a personal choice at this stage in my life, and I’m ok with that.  As much as I’d like to substitute a pretty girl’s head on my chest for Laila Jo’s furry-engine-purring when I (finally) go to bed at night, living alone is also something that makes me happy.  Not having to clean up after someone else and the resultant (relative) ease of maintaining my home’s feng shui are interrelated aspects of this.  While I haven’t actively severed ties with most of my recent friends, I haven’t done much in the way of maintaining the bridges between us.  Too many people have given me the impression that I’m really only good for whatever I can do for them, and that doesn’t make me happy.  I prefer the friendships that are based upon unconditional love – the ones where you’re buddies and that’s pretty much it, you know?  No strings, no quid pro quo.

10.  Reading and writing make me happy.  Both are kind of an escapist thing for me, but whatever.  I like reading fictions and writing facts.  Writing is cathartic for me, and reading is good for my imagination, which makes me more productive.  So does chess, but this post is long enough.

So that’s it.  Ten things.  Today, I spent some time reading, writing (in the comfortable feng shui of my apartment), and driving (fast, in moderate traffic, while drinking strong coffee and smoking cigarettes, listening to music with a solid beat).  I thought about calling Katie, but figured that was precluded under the “small doses” rule, given our interaction on facebook today.  I’m not even going to get into my usage of tools.

I’ll now do my best to tag five bloggers that make me happy:

Lauren Flax of the blog of the same title

Didi at Vodka Fuelled Diatribes

Sabrina at The Sabs.com

Samiantha at Being Samiantha

Jon Barker (aka “Barker Fett”) at JonMTM: A Private Lyricist

I can’t believe I was able to come up with five bloggers that quicly and easily.  What up, tribe.

I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

***

The word “procrastination” is a combination of two Latin words:  pro = “for”, cras = “tomorrow”.  For tomorrow.

***

Seriously, I feel like I’m back in college.  I was really hoping to hit the ground running this week, but something’s kind of holding me back.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m trying to be proactive at work, but am meeting only resistance, which probably means that it’s not yet time for me to be spearheading anything in particular.  By which I do not mean it’s not that time in my life, but rather that it’s not that time of year yet.

An example might help here, wouldn’t it, dear reader?  Maybe I’ll give you one in a minute.  Let me ramble for a bit, please.

Things are not starting to pile up for me – yet.  But they will.  Soon.  Up yours Hemingway:  you and your terseness making me all curt with my writing and sh*t.

Which reminds me to pass along my friend and fraternity brother Pete Zeigler’s joke (just in case we’re not facebook-friends and/or you didn’t see his comment to yesterday’s post on fb):

Q:  Why did Hemingway’s chicken cross the road?

A:  To die.  Alone.  In the rain.

***

I’m not sure if you’re picking up on the whole digression-as-procrastination irony within this post yet, dear reader, but it’s there.  Here?

Anyway, in the past few days I’ve had a handful of things come up that relate to future projects.  Now is the time to start preparing for them, but the busy time is not here yet.  So I’m kind of procrastinating the preparation because there’s no fire under my ass.  Which is also why – I think – the Universe is telling me it’s not yet time to downshift and get into the fast lane.

I’m not exactly sure what the Universe is telling me right now.  Maybe it’s giving me a heads-up to enjoy a little bit of semi-busy time before the wicked-busy time hits me.  I know it’s going to come all at once.

Examples:

1. I’ve been working on a project on hedge fund activism at work for the past couple of years and the “go live” date has recently been re-set for mid-January.That’s like next week.  Thing is, the part for which I’m responsible is pretty much done and has been for quite some time now.  Other people have parts to play, but they’ve not executed yet.  I’m not really “in charge”, so I can’t light a fire under their asses, even though that’s what needs to be done.  And I just don’t feel like trying to be a cheerleader or Paul Revere for anyone – I’ve done it before and it’s just no use and only frustrating for me.

   So I have to wait.

2. I have another project at work with a drop-dead date of February 9th.

   But I won’t receive the data I need to start the project until sometime after January 11th, so there’s not much I can do to prepare.  Any preparation I put together now will only be semi-effective, because (a) the preparations will be stale in a week, and (b) I don’t want to be a Chicken Little or a Boy Who Cried Wolf, because when the fire’s finally lit under my ass, nobody’s going to pat me down when I stop-drop-and-roll.

3. The company for which I currently write website copy on the side is about to get very busy.

4. A buddy of mine just contacted me to let me know that he’s going to have some copywriting work coming up for two different companies.  But not for a little bit – start date is still TBD.
   

I talked to my boss today about getting some help for the upcoming projects at work and he responded with some pretty standard push-back.  That’s a real pain in the ass and basically just dampens my initiative.  The best way for me to be prepared for the upcoming projects is to get people trained and firing on all cylinders so that when the rubber meets the road, we’ll be ready.  I even suggested a side-project that I can use to train my extra help, which would be beneficial to other aspects of the business and keep my help busy without having them twiddling their thumbs.  More push-back.

So it looks like my work projects are going to get done the way they’ve always gotten done:  long hours for me, under the gun, with a constant feeling of playing catch-up.

That’s fine; that’s what it feels like the Universe is telling me.

I haven’t talked too much yet about the fact that Chinese New Year is coming up and that this year will be the year of the Tiger – which relates to personal achievement (as opposed to this soon-to-be-ending year of the Ox, which is/was a year of dogged plodding and hard work).  Maybe I’m supposed to grab the bull by the balls and give my boss what-for:  tell him that my work ethic demands excellence and that I’ll settle for nothing less than the extra help I need NOW, so that I can get them up and running.  Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

My, this post is rife with cliches, isn’t it dear reader?

I suppose the icing on the cake for me today was reading Lauren Flax‘s post “MIA” this afternoon.  She pretty much hits the nail on the head with how I’m feeling right now, which isn’t altogether an unfamiliar feeling:

“…my life lacks intensity, focus, and purpose.

Of course, it hasn’t always been this way, and that is good. But, I have been coasting longer than necessary, and I think it is time to assess where I am, and either hit the brakes or hit the gas.

I am not looking for a new career, or to write a novel, or really anything quantifiable. It is more that I don’t have much drive about how life is going to be so that all of that other stuff can show up as the result. This is where I usually start complaining about the fact that no one gets me, and I need to find a community of like-minded people and blah blah blah. The world is still lonely sometimes, but I am getting better about seeking out people who do good things for my heart and mind. I have come a long way in the past year. Still, sometimes it would be nice if it were a little easier, if some one would just figure it out for me. Just in case anyone has figured it out for me, I’ll ask: What am I missing? What is the next chapter?”

I’ve heard it said “…but it’s hell in the hallway” in response to the old saying “when one door closes, another door opens”.  And that’s pretty much where I’m at right now:  in the hallway.  Like I said, it’s not an entirely unfamiliar feeling.  I just don’t particularly like it.

I don’t know what to do with myself.  When a project starts and the proverbial fire is lit, I’m a f*ckin animal.  I get things done like nobody’s business – and they get done well.  But it’s those moments of weightlessness between the hard burning of upward flight and the acceleration of the dive that comes from giving in to (and becoming one with) gravity where I lose my direction and feel lost.  I simply don’t know how to enjoy the view while I’m up there.

What I should be doing right now is what I did a few months ago:  look at the earth below me and take aim at some point so that when gravity takes hold, all I have to do is steer a little bit here and there.  In other words, put together another priorities list.

Yes, that’s what I need to do.  My former Inventory & Priorities list [See: Inventory & List of Priorities (1), (2), (2a), (3,4)] is pretty much now defunct.  All the short-term goals of that list have been achieved, and all I have to do is keep going in the general direction I’ve already set to achieve the long-term goal of getting my winter patch for the Catskill 3500 Club (viz. climb mountains every weekend).

Yup, that’s why I’m directionless and procrastinating right now.  (Thanks for following along this broken stream of logic with me, dear reader.)  I need to put together another Inventory & List of Priorities for 2010.

The busy season at work starts in March and goes through mid-July, and as I mentioned above, it’s going to start around January 11th for me this year.  So I need to figure out what I’m going to aim at.  When a hawk dives on its prey, it isn’t falling, it’s flying downward:  the velocity of a hawk’s dive is much greater than the simple product of its mass and the acceleration of gravity (9.81 m/s²).

I need to get a bead on my prey and shape my wings the way a hawk does during this time of weightlessness.

So I’m at the beginning of my Catskill 3500 Club winter peaks goal, right?  I mean, I’ve been talking about it for a while now, but why am I doing it (you ask yourself)?

At the end of the day, I think it’s basically ego-driven.  I enjoy hiking, but I like the sense of accomplishment I get from checking peaks off a list in pursuit of an overall goal.  I was shooting for my Catskill 3500 Club patch, and now I’m shooting for the winter patch.  When I’m done with this goal, I’ll move on to the 46 high peaks in the Adirondacks, for the Adirondack 46ers patch.

It’s the patches I’m after, not joining the clubs.  Not the physical piece of fabric and thread, but the symbol that I’ve accomplished the goal.  And, to a certain extent, the harder the goal, the better; the more valuable the patch to me.

I don’t hike or climb mountains for the simple joy of it, as many people do.  I don’t really want to climb a mountain unless I can check it off my list when I’m done.  I don’t really like climbing the same mountain twice.  Oh, I don’t mind climbing a mountain again if I’m taking someone out to see what it’s like, but I prefer to have a reason for climbing the mountain.

In the past few months I’ve skipped hiking quite a few weekends simply because I didn’t have any mountains to climb that were part of an overall goal.  I’ll be out there for the next 12 weekends (and a few more days this week) simply because of my winter peaks goal.  I recently climbed Kaaterskill High Peak and Indian Head and Twin because I wanted to get my skinny ass in shape for this week, but also to be sure that I knew the best way to climb them when they counted (which is now).  Those hikes were more scouting runs than anything else.

***

I recently received the latest issue of The Canister, the Catskill 3500 Club’s newsletter.  Between now and March 22d, member-led hikes are scheduled for just about all of the winter peaks I have left to climb.

I think I might sign up for one or two, but I’ll probably continue to hike alone this winter.  Again on the ego-driven thing, I won’t get the same sense of accomplishment if I follow someone to the top of the mountain.  I’d rather figure out how to get there myself.

That said, there are a couple of mountains (Friday and Balsam Cap, and maybe one or two more) that are particularly difficult; it may be worth my while to learn the best way up the mountain by following someone else.  And for a couple of the other tougher bushwacks, I may just contact the hike leader to find out from where they plan to set out, so that I can follow their tracks the week after.  For whatever reason, that seems to be a loophole that’s acceptable to my ego.

***

So whatever my motivation, at least I’m getting out there and climbing mountains.  As I’ve said before, it’s really good for me – physically, mentally and spiritually.  Sometimes I feel like I need it in order to stay sane.  There are plenty of mountains left within driving distance for me to climb.  I won’t run out of goals for at least the next couple of years.

I’ve been giggling my ass off all night long.  And I’ve got Bob Marley playing on the stereo right now.

No, dear reader, I’m not pulling tubes in my apartment.  I’ve been having a great time on facebook with my buddy Matt Helmick (@IntegralHack on Twitter), and for whatever reason, I can’t blog to Marley.  I have no idea why, but my thoughts just don’t stay on track when he’s in the background.  I know these CDs back-to-front, so one would think it would be as meditative for me as anything else, but it’s just not.

Anyway, Matt and I bumped into one another via the yoga circles on Twitter.  After spending some time slinging 140 character one-liners back and forth, he found me on facebook.  And facebook’s functionality has definitely trumped Twitter as far as cross-country friendship-building possibilities go.

So yeah, before this gets to be sounding too gay – frig, I lost my train of thought again.  Damn you, Bob.

Oh yeah:  Matt and I have three fellow mateys on facebook (read: three friends in common – I view facebook in English (Pirate), so I don’t see things quite like you do):  Andrei Codrescu, Liz Wilhite and Jennilyn Carson.  Jennilyn came first – she also travels in the Twitter yoga circles as @yogadork; her blog is on my blogroll (down and to the right).

Andrei is some author for the New York Times or some such publication for The Man – I don’t remember.  I think Matt, Liz and I were going back and forth in Matt’s facebook comments about something Andrei wrote – so I friended him and passed his link along to them.  Liz and Matt are friends IRL, I think.  Somewhere in there, I friended Liz as well – her comments and status updates are dry and witty and totally fits her url slug “Satirica”.  Awesome.  I just noticed that.

I’ve been meaning to ask Liz for a cake recipe or two.

This evening, Matt’s sister Wendi posted a comment in the thread that Liz and I were in.  I chanced to mention to Matt that Wendi is H4WT, and he suggested a sister-swap.  Being ever the gentleman and protective brother I am, I of course declined, but said that I would certainly friend-suggest my favorite sister Katie (who always brings the awesomeness) to him, that we might have more fellow mateys.  Which I did.

And to my surprise, Matt also suggested Wendi as a possible swashbucklin’ matey fer me!  Will wonders never cease.  I am continually astounded at the bounteous synchronicity of this Universe.  It’s honestly a wonder that I’m still agnostic.

So if everything works as the Universe seems to have planned – totally independent of any meddling on our parts – Matt and I will, sometime in the near future, have 5 fellow mateys.  Oh frabjous day, caloo calay!

KATIE IF YOU DON’T FRIEND MATT I’M GOING TO SET YOUR CAR ON FIRE *AFTER* I COVER IT IN BOLOGNA.

Seriously.  I know you’re logged in to facebook right now.  JUST DO IT.

Stupid reggae.  Where was I?  Huh.  I totally lost my train of thought.  Again.

In any case, I’m off to bed now, to lay my head a-rest on that sweet pillow of balance in the Universe – the pillowcase being gratitude, of course.

Is it possible to be a Type A personality and a night-owl?  I’m a card-carrying member of the latter group.  Well, I don’t really have a card that says “Ted Wallace, Night Owl” – though maybe I should.  I mean, I get a sh*tload of stuff done in any given day, but I’m just not an early-riser.  It’s much easier for me to add a few extra hours on to the end of the day than it is for me to try to stack them up at the beginning.

What do you think, dear reader?

Not that I’m dying to qualify as a Type A personality – those people are usually wound WAY too tight for me.  I try to be as laid back, mellow and relaxed as possible.  Though if you took a look at how busy I am, you might tend to disagree.  I don’t know.  For those of you who know me IRL, do you think I’m a Type A or Type B?

Here are the characteristics:

Type A individuals can be described as impatient, time-conscious, concerned about their status, highly competitive, ambitious, business-like, aggressive, having difficulty relaxing; and are sometimes disliked by individuals with Type B personalties for the way that they’re always rushing.  They are often high-achieving workaholics who multi-task, drive themselves with deadlines, and are unhappy about delays.  Because of these characteristics, Type A individuals are often described as “stress junkies.”

Type B individuals, in contrast, are described as patient, relaxed, and easy-going, generally lacking any sense of urgency.  Because of these characteristics, Type B individuals are often described as apathetic and disengaged.

I still don’t know.  On the one hand, I’d say that a lot (hell, most) of the Type A traits fit me like a glove.  On the other hand, I’m happiest when I’m in that Type B zone.  If anything, I’m like a Type A who aspires to be a Type B.

Wikipedia also says “There is also a Type AB mixed profile for people who cannot be clearly categorized.“

Without being too agnostic about the whole thing, I’d say I probably fall into that last “AB” category.

What do you think?  What personality type do you have, dear reader?

Saturday morning I’ll be hiking Whiteface and Esther Mountains in the Adirondacks.  They’ll be numbers 3 and 4 of 46 for my Adirondack 46ers patch.

View Larger Map

I wasn’t kidding when I put those last few posts together.  I’m getting a move-on.  It’s now 11:44 in the post meridian on Thursday night, and I’m heading off to bed as soon as this post is finished.  I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow so that I can finish up a couple of things that, by all rights, should take me all day.  I’m planning on leaving around 2PM and headed straight for the ‘dacks.  My car is already packed.

I’ll be staying at the High Peaks Hostel in Lake Placid NY on Friday night.  I’ll bring my netbook, but I have no idea if they’ll have wi-fi (or even if I’ll have cell phone service).  Hell, I don’t even think there’s a Starbucks up that way.  Oop – I was wrong.  There’s one at 90 Main Street in Lake Placid.  Score.

Saturday morning, I’ll wake up early and head up to Whiteface.  If you look closely at the map – and maybe even zoom in – you’ll see that 431 goes pretty much right to the top.  I wonder if there’s a parking lot up there like there is at the top of High Point here in good ole NJ.  That’s so New Jersey:  the highest point in the state has a parking lot on it.

Whether or not I can actually drive to the summit, I still have to head off into the woods and hike to the top of Esther.  I think that might even be a bushwack.  The round-trip hike should be about 4 or 5 miles.  Not a lot to drive about five hours each way, but I’ve got to bag these peaks sometime.

So yeah, I don’t know if I’ll be able to post on Friday night or not.  If I can get to that Starbucks (and their wi-fi is working), I will.

I’ve been exchanging emails with Didi over the past few days; it’s been very cathartic.  This morning (yesterday afternoon for her) she said:

Ahh… your posts over the last few months now make so much sense. I haven’t been commenting much because I’ve been feeling that the posts were somehow… impersonal? They seem pretty… sanitised, somehow? Clinical, almost. Like… you were blogging and putting posts up because you had to, as opposed to because you felt like blogging. I got the vibe that you’d like to say more, but for whatever reason, you weren’t doing it. Blogwise… to a certain extent, I can relate… but at the same time, I don’t really. Then again, I suppose you and I blog for different reasons. I blog to vent and you do it… well… as a possible source of income? As… an outlet (of sorts)?

But with your last email… I understand… and I can relate.

Your… state of flux… the whole loner vs socialite… the emotional entanglements and that bloody sense of time wasted. Most of all, I can relate to your need to re-invent yourself and your restlessness.

Have you found my last posts to be cold and detached, dear reader?  I suppose they may have been, in a way.  I don’t blog as a source of income (as much as I’d like to), but rather for the cathartic effect (among other reasons).  If I have the time and inclination in the next few days, I may get into more detail about what’s been going on with me over the past few weeks.  Then again, I may not.  I’m toying with the idea of posting some of the stuff in my emails to Didi as time capsules – include the correct dates, but set them to publish in the past, in effect burying them within the 300-odd posts already on this website.

There’s definitely some stuff there that I think is worth sharing with you, dear reader, just not at this particular moment.  And it may do me some good to force you to search them out.

Suffice to say, I’ve turned a corner over the past couple of weeks or so and I want to continue on this track.  Much like when I posted “It’s Time to Ramble On” back in March, I found myself waiting on other people over the past few months or so.  And I’m tired of it.  It’s time for me to get a bit selfish again and get back to doing the things I want to do, whether or not I’m alone when I do so.

This mostly comes down to people-pleasing, which infects my life in very subtle ways – so much so that what seems a few snowflakes at first becomes an avalanche of faux altruism before I know it.  I don’t know exactly how or why I slipped back into this self-fulfilling prophecy of low self-esteem, but I ain’t havin’ it no more.  I’m done.

The few steps I’ve taken this past week – including the inventories you’ve been reading – have already generated the sense of accomplishment for which I’ve been looking.  So I know I’m on the right path.  I’m going to continue this trek and be grateful for the good things that happen along the way.

Peace out.

The wrecking is complete, please continue the checking:

So I think that in my last post I basically covered numbers three and four of my prioritization process, but for the sakes of continuity, repetition and closure, I’ll cover them once more:

3.  After that, I’m going to put those groups into an order of priority – which ones I want to get/achieve first

So the process I ended up following was making kind of a spectrum of my priorities.  I put the “Gig” list at one end:  decisions too big and all-encompassing to make right now; and the smaller stuff from the “Have”s list (clothes, etc.) at the other end:  things that are too small to worry about right now.  I’ll count on the muse to move me to buy new jeans; I don’t need to plan that out.

In the middle are the achievable goals that require some sort of planning or preparation:  the Catskill 3500 Club winter patch and, to a lesser extent the Adirondack 46ers patch.  As I said in yesterday’s post, the former has more stringent time-constraints, and the latter will have to be stretched over such a long time-horizon that it’s not worth my time to fully plan that goal out in detail right now.

Other things that fall into the middle of the list are the MAT and the iPhone.  Both of which are “just do it” items.

4.  Then (I may skip that last step and go directly to this one) I’m going to figure out a couple of long- and short-term life goals and start moving toward them.  Inexorably.

I didn’t precisely skip #3 and go to #4, instead adding a #2a in there as well, but I think you got the picture.

As to moving – inexorably – toward these goals:

Today (Tuesday – I’m a night-blogger, remember?) I put the 3500 Club mountains into a spreadsheet and organized them by area of the Catskills, after removing the mountains I’ve already climbed in the winter.  I then highlighted them on my maps in blue and have started a list of which mountains can be climbed together and which can only be climbed by themselves.

I also emailed one of the hostels in Lake Placid requesting a reservation for a bed this Friday night.  I plan to climb Whiteface and Esther mountains in the Adirondacks on Saturday (and make it home in time for my parents’ anniversary dinner Saturday night at 7).

Tomorrow (Wednesday, which is today for you, dear reader), I plan to call the schools that offer the MAT and book myself a seat at the next convenient testing.

I’ve already been on the Apple website and filled out my information for the iPhone, as well as spoken to several people about their feelings on iPhone vs. Google Android.  I still need to figure out how to get Apple to let me keep my 202 area code phone number, even though my primary service area will be in NJ.  That may take a few days.

So that’s it, dear reader.  Maybe I’ll give you some of my rationale behind all these decisions in Thursday’s post.  And maybe not.  Stay tuned.

Please continue checking the wrecking; we’re almost there.

So I’ve made my list and I’ve organized it.  And here’s what I’ve got so far:

I’m leaving off the “Gig” topic for now.  There’s a lot to it that I need to spend more time researching and thinking about. Two of those points (Attorney & Teaching) involve an complete directional change in my career.  My current mindset is a bit too shaky for me to be making decisions that drastic at this time.

The “Gig” topic won’t be far from my mind, though.  I spend a lot of time on the internet and I’ve seen some possible options for part-time (e.g. while not-at-work) gigs in social media and writing.  I’m in a handful of social media and writing groups on LinkedIn, so I’m fairly well in-touch with the internet possibilities (copywriting, etc.) for those outlets.  I’ll keep my eyes open for things that look interesting; this will be an ongoing kind of goal that doesn’t require much more than that.

That leaves me with my “Do” and “Have” lists.  As Apoc so aptly pointed out in yesterday’s comments, the “Have”s tend to support the “Do”s.  So I’m going to start with the “Do”s:

Of those, getting my winter patch for the Catskill 3500 Club has the most rigid requirements.  To wit, in order to qualify as a “winter” peak, I must climb each of the 35 mountains in the Catskills that are over 3500 feet between December 22nd and March 22nd.  There are 13 weekends in this time frame and I have 27 mountains left to climb in that span.  Yes, that works out to about 2 mountains per weekend – in the snow – give or take.  This is a tough goal, but not an unattainable one, given that

1. each weekend has two days,
2. climbing more than one mountain per day is entirely possible,
3. I’ve climbed all these mountains before,
4. I own the proper gear, and
5. the Catskills are close enough for me to do day-trips (i.e. drive up, climb mountain(s), drive home for a hot shower and meal and a night in a warm bed – rinse and repeat if necessary).

So all that’s left is to sit down and figure out which mountains I plan to climb on each of those thirteen weekends.  I’ll spare you those particular details, dear reader.  Stay tuned:  each weekend is sure to be encapsulated in a blog post.

Next on the list is the Adirondack 46ers patch.  This goal is completely attainable, albeit over a longer period.  I have thusfar climbed 2 of the 46 required peaks.  Given:

1. that this goal will probably take me a year or more of weekend hiking to complete,
2. that the weekends between 12/22/2009 and 3/22/2010 will be spent in the Catskills, and
3. that the May/June months in the Adirondacks are more-or-less unhikeable due to black fly season,

I’m going to put this goal down as “long-term” and basically back-burner it for the purposes of this inventory.  I’m going to need to get in shape for the Catskill 3500 Club winter patch goal, and I’m also going to need to get used to driving up to the ‘dacks (and learn my way around), so I’m going to try to get up there and knock a few of the high peaks off my list between now and 12/22.  The best way for me to do this will be to drive up on Friday night and stay somewhere in the area so that I can get an early start on the hike on Saturday morning.  To this end, I’ve already found a couple of inexpensive hostels in the area at which to stay.  I’ll email them this week for details and booking requirements.  This also means that I’ll have to find someone to cover me for my Friday night commitments for a few weeks here and there.

The rest of the bullets on the “Do” list are fairly easily eliminated:

• MAT (Miller Analogies Test):  Just take it.  Sign up this week for the next available seat and commit.  Study/prepare as needed.
• Practice my bass and do pushups:  Just do it.  Finger the strings a bit each night; do a few pushups every morning and every evening.
• Bar Exam:  No change:  Still a major life-decision; see “Gig”.
• Book:  Maybe consolidate my blog posts and put together a book on my hikes.

Finally, as I mentioned before, the things on my “Have” list dovetail almost completely with my “Do” list.  And I think the iPhone my be the answer to the GPS and digital camera desires:  the iPhone has a camera and I think I’ve found a GPS application for it that does pretty much everything I want in a GPS unit (which is basically a detailed tracking of my progress while hiking).

The wardrobe aspect of my “Have”s list is something I can figure out as I go.  I feel no pressure to completely refresh my wardrobe right away.  The suits I currently own are fine; maybe I’ll buy a new one at some point if I have the scratch and the overwhelming desire to do so, and I’ll leave the replenishment of my argyle supply to Mom at Christmas and impulse buys.

No, dear reader, I’m not forgetting that “Girl” is on my list of “Have”s as well.  That’s another one that I’m going to back-burner for the moment.  I’m very tempted to set up a Match.com profile – it seems to be the best website for a single dude in NNJ to join and get dates (you should meet some of the retards I know that get dates from that site) – but especially after my eHarmony experience, I’m wary of fantasizing a(nother) website into the realm of panacea.

Besides the fact that Match.com is going to run me about $138 for a 6 month membership, I also need to consider the fact that I’m a gentleman and enjoy paying for things on dates.  I’m not completely backward, going dutch or letting the lady pay is fine by me, but I’m kind of a stickler for taking a girl out on at least the first few dates.  And if I assume that I’ll get some dates from Match (ergo, it would be worth the membership fee), I also have to assume that I’m going to be out-of-pocket quite a bit of scratch for said dates.

I’m going to think more on the Match.com thing.  Philosophically, if I’m doing all the things on my “Do”s list, I’ll be having a damned good time and will be giving off all kinds of successful come-fuck-me vibes.  That said, I’ve been doing said things and giving off said vibes for quite a while now, with not much to show for it in the XX chromosome category.

Yes, I understand that I’m blurring the fuck/love line right now, but that’s strictly for the purpose of brevity.  This is really more of a topic for a whole ‘nother post entirely.  So I’m going to leave it at that.  Besides, if I’m dropping the f-bomb in with my oh-so-professional writing style more than once in 500 words, then it probably means that my filter is off and I’m just heading down the road of morning-after embarrassment.  So yeah, I’m leaving it at that.  Er, this:  the whole girl-issue is so far from far-from-my-mind that I think I’m better off thinking about other things for a bit.  You dig?

Check it as I continue to wreck it.

I reorganized my list into groups of things that are like each other.  And then I did it again.  What I came up with were three main ideas:  things I want to do, things I want to do, things I want to have and “Gig”.  Here’s the breakdown:

Have

• iPhone
• GPS
• Digital Camera
• Clothes (sundry; I’ll spare you the complete list)
• Girl

Do

• 3500 Club winter patch
• Adirondack 46ers patch
• Book (write one)
• MAT (Miller Analogies Test)
• Bass/pushups (daily stuff)
• Bar Exam (see Gig)

Gig

• Social Media (part time?)
• Writing (part time?)
• Attorney – solo practitioner
• Teaching (PhD/Professorial – graduate/undergrad)

So that’s it for this step.  All of the foregoing was done with pen and paper, and I went through a few drafts of each.  The above is a much cleaner version of what I’m actually working with; it’s also a lot less detailed.

In between this step and the next one (#3, prioritization), I’ve been doing a bit of research on what each of these goals will require of me – whether it be monetary, temporal or emotional.  This is something I need to do in order to set my goals and prioritize them.  Some will be relatively easily attainable, and others will require significant monetary, temporal and/or emotional investments on my part.

Ok.  Check it as I wreck it:

I’ve been all over the place lately.  Looking for instant gratification in all the wrong places.  Well, the right places, but instant gratification isn’t what I need; I get too wrapped up in it and forget about long-term goals.

So here’s my plan:  I’m going to do an inventory and figure out what my goals are (or are going to be or should be or whatever).  That way, I can start out on the path toward these goals, instead of running around (figuratively) jerking off all over the place and not really getting anything substantial done with my life at present.

1. I’m going to start by making a list of all the things I want to do or have.  The beginning of that list is below.
2. Then I’m going to group those things in the list into…well, things that are like each other.
3. After that, I’m going to put those groups into an order of priority – which ones I want to get/achieve first.
4. Then (I may skip that last step and go directly to this one) I’m going to figure out a couple of long- and short-term life goals and start moving toward them.  Inexorably.

You see, I’ve been all over the place lately and I realize that I haven’t been moving toward any particular goals at all.  I’m just kind of doing things for a “feel good” sensation as soon as possible.  But I’m repeating myself.

The purpose of this is to get me back onto a normal cycle of effort and sense of accomplishment.  I know that even just a little bit of a sense of accomplishment is like a catalyst for more effort.  It’s definitely an ouroborean chicken/egg thing:  one begets the other.

It’s an unending cycle.  Except that at some point in the past few months, the cycle ended for me.  Well maybe not ended.  Maybe a wave analogy would be better at this point:

My emotional wave has become completely irregular – amplitude, wavelength, and period are not predictable.  In my attempt to increase the frequency of my “feel good” moments (metaphors officially mixed), I shorten the wavelength by messing around too much on facebook and other social media sites (or doing other things), but eventually get bored and flatline for a bit – before starting all over again.  But again, everything is irregular.  There’s no predictability.  I need to get back to the rolling waves of the deep ocean (see me in my little lifeboat, riding to the crest, then surfing into the trough).

Seriously, I know you don’t usually click the links, dear reader, but if you check out the bewitched pictures in the last couple of links, you’ll get a better feel for what I’m talking about.

Did I mention that my facebook time is now spent reading in English (Pirate)?

So.  Before I digress further, here’s the beginning of my list (I’ll continue to add to it in the next few days)”

Things I’d Like to Do/Have

• pushups
• iPhone
• GPS
• 46ers patch
• 3500 Club winter patch
• girl
• more $
• my own business
• bar membership(s)/solo practitioner attorney
• social media gig
• new suit
• topcoat
• pay off student loans
• new jeans
• be more on time to work
• become a more proficient bass player
• more social media followers/friends/influence

Yes, yes, I know that most of these things are material and that I seem to be ignoring the spiritual.  But please remember, dear reader, that I’m a zen pragmatist.  I believe strongly in “chop wood, fetch water, seek enlightenment” and other such things.  “Bring the body and the mind will follow” is a good one too.  My mind is always going anyway; as long as I’m doing something, my thoughts tend to be clearer and less jumbled.  This lonely philosopher achieves enlightenment through action.

What’s your current outlook on life?  Is it rosy?  Is the glass half-full, or half-empty?

What’s your focus on right now?  Not in general; I’m not asking if you’re an optimist or a pessimist, but rather how you view life right at this moment.  If that’s a bit too pressing or hard to nail down, then what has your focus been on for the last week or so?

Work?  Play?  Dating?  Family?  Adventures?

For a lot of people (mostly nine-to-fivers), Labor Day marked a turning point: summer’s over, back to work.  Was that the case for you?

I have a friend who’s a schoolteacher, so the beginning of September signalled back-to-school; and, consequently, back to work.  She’s a hard worker and a perfectionist and wicked stressed out.  Weekends are too short and there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to get everything done during the week.

I want to urge her to enjoy life – to step back, take a deep breath, and enjoy the scenery.  Smell the roses, as it were (though I’m more of an hyacinth kind of guy – but I’m sure, dear reader, that you’re picking up what I’m putting down).

Thing is, I don’t know that that’s necessarily the right advice.  The Beatles did that song “to everything (turn, turn, turn) / there is a season (turn, turn, turn)…”  Those lyrics are actually from the Bible:

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

I’m not a big Beatles fan, but I think they get the vibe across pretty well:  it’s about balance.  Sometimes we’re supposed to sit back and figure out what the cloud-shapes mean, and other times, we’re supposed to buckle-down, put our noses to the grindstone and work.

So my basic question is this:  is that right?  Is it proper or even possible to enjoy the ride all the time?  Is my friend just in one of those times of war, sewing, gathering, breaking down, planting, etc.?  Do those times have definite beginnings and endings, or are they more grey than black and white?

That is, are these times measured in hours, days, months, or are they measured in moments?  Does proper balance dictate that these times be part of our daily lives, ups and downs within each day, or should they be segregated and confined to busy-times and vacation days?

I don’t really have an answer.  That’s why I’m asking you, dear reader.  I suppose that for me, everything is always grey.  That’s why I call myself agnostic.  Sure, I’ve had those buckle-down, no enjoyment times, but they’re not all drudgery:  I get a certain enjoyment out of the accomplishments along the way.  “Life is a journey, not a series of destinations.”

What do you think?  What’s your outlook right now?  Are you pursuing your passion(s) daily with your every waking breath, or trying to fit it (them) in where you can?  Are you succeeding?

When I think about my character defects, I generally try to relate them back to the seven deadly sins.  This keeps me from coming up with more character defects than I can possibly work on.  For example:  I’m constantly late for work.  Being late in and of itself is not a defect of character – it’s merely the way that my character defects affect my behavior.  In looking at my constant lateness, I can drill down to two things:  pride and sloth.

Pride, insofar as I feel I’m so special and do so much good work that I don’t need to show up at work when I’m supposed to.  I consider myself above the rules.  Now, I don’t think “I’m above the rules, so I can show up to work whenever I want” – but I stay up later than I should blogging and messing around on various social media outlets.  What I’m doing is putting my personal desires and pursuits ahead of my responsibilities.  To a certain extent, this indicates a lack of respect for my job, and maybe even my co-workers.  Again, these are not explicit thoughts that I have, but my actions imply them.

Sloth, in that I’d rather lie in bed, hitting the snooze bar for an hour, than wake up when my alarm goes off.  That’s just plain lazy.

Over the past few days, my considerations of my character defects (an ongoing effort) have led me to focus specifically on pride and fear.  Fear itself is not necessarily a defect of character – it’s more of a catalyst, something that causes me to be more likely to act out on my defects of character.

Pride – in all its various incarnations – and its children, rationalization and self-justification is a constant struggle for me.  It guides me subtly to places I don’t want to be – mentally and emotionally.

Fear gets me there faster.

Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about fear of success and fear of failure.  I have both.  And I can tell you that both were instilled in me mostly by my father.  (Have no fear, I’ll not get into a discussion of my Oedipus Complex here.)  Teachers and male role models have also installed these buttons in me.  I’m not going to lay this all at the feet of my father.

I’m the eldest of three children.  When I was young, it was impressed upon me that I shouldn’t “outshine” my siblings.  Failure was also not tolerated in my childhood household – nor, really, here in America (land of capitalists).

So I’m afraid of doing too well at something, because by doing so I’m necessarily doing better than someone else, and that’s not good for their feelings or development.

I’m also afraid of not succeeding, which translates into a kind of perfectionism on my part.  Growing up, someone was always pointing out how I could have done something better.  Whatever their intentions, I translated this to mean that I had failed at my task (in however small a way, failure is still failure).

The enemy of good is perfection.

When I dream (and remember what I dream), I usually dream about some sort of inability to succeed.  For example, I’m running away from or toward something, but I just can’t seem to make my legs go faster.  They’re just so tired.  I know I’m well-rested and should be able to increase my speed, but I just can’t.

Or I’ll be in a fight with something and just can’t seem to hit it hard enough – or I simply won’t decapitate it, even though I know full well that my sword is long and sharp enough and that I have the skill to do so.

For the most part, when I’m dreaming, I know I’m dreaming.  But for whatever reason, I never give myself cool super-powers; I never think “hey, I’m dreaming, why don’t I fly around for a bit?”  (Sometimes I’m telekinetic, though – but only a little bit.)  Being predominantly right-brained, my dreams are more holistic and deal with emotions – feelings - than actions.

Last night I dreamt that I was playing soccer on a team against a much superior team.  There was no way that we could possibly win.  We decided to go balls-to-the-wall and play as hard as we could, even though winning was impossible.  When I woke up (or the dream ended), I think the score was like 2-1 (us).

I scored one of the goals.  It wasn’t pretty or fancy or perfect, but it was a goal.  In another attempt, I hesitated and hit the post.

I played soccer from elementary through high school – on school and club teams – and I don’t think I ever scored except in practice.  It was an entirely new feeling for me.

So I think my dream indicates a kind of moving-forward for me, mentally and emotionally.  My dad has a coffee mug on his desk that says “You Miss 100% of the Shots You Don’t Take”.  And that’s exactly what I was like growing up.  I never took any shots – mostly out of fear.  Fear of success (that I’d be part of the reason why someone on the other team felt like a loser) and fear of failure (that I had to take the perfect shot in order to score).  Pride plays more of a part in the former.  Again, these are more subconscious thoughts than conscious ones.

I think my dream last night is an indication that I’m not so much afraid of failure or success as I used to be.  That I’m more willing to take the shots than I’ve been in the past – whether I miss them or not.  I can’t score if I don’t shoot.

If you’re giggling to yourself now, saying “heheee: he said ‘score‘,” well…so am I (a little), but sex isn’t all I think about.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about ego deflation in the last couple of days.  I was speaking with a friend of mine this evening, and she passed along this aphorism:  “10% of life is what happens to us, 90% is our reaction to it.”

Now, what I’m wondering is if we follow the “kill self now” aspect of so many philosophies (zen, for example), and get with the fact that shit happens – shit doesn’t happen to us, it just happens - then what exactly is that other 90%?

That is – hypothetically speaking, of course – if I can come to terms with the fact that there is no ‘me’, that I’m just one teeny piece of the universe, and I can put away the whole concept of something happening ‘to me’, then what am I left with?

A thorough discussion of acceptance is well outside the scope of this post, but if you’re down with the notions I’m throwing your way, what happens to that 90% of life that’s supposed to be all reaction to the happenings?  Is it just air – nothingness – like the air inside of whipped cream or styrofoam?  Or is it nothing at all, and the 10% is really 100% – do we then get lost in that 10% of life, because that’s all there really is (shit happens)?

Is it the tao that fills the empty ewer?  What do you think?

It seems to me (note the self-conscious self-reference) that if the all-important *I* is removed from the equation, there can be really no conclusion other than that the 10% is really 100%, and that what passes for ‘me’ is just one little bit of everything.  And, if we stir in a bit of reductio ad absurdum, there really aren’t any little ‘bits’ at all – everything is everything (as the divas say) – and, consequently, *I* am everything – and nothing – at the same time.

Thus concludes today’s lesson in mind-fucking.  Procrastination classes start tomorrow.

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

-Michel de Montaigne

I’m kind of a weirdo.  I don’t have too much of a problem admitting that.  It works like this:  like most people, I have idiosyncracies, some of which I’ve cultivated.  At some point, they may have qualified as affectations, but now they’re part of who I am.  Some of the bits of uniqueness that I’ve chosen to cultivate are ones that place me outside the realm of “normal” society.  I dig that.  I am an individual and want to be treated as such.  I fully recognize these can be ego-feeding propositions, and I will also admit that my motives were once-upon-a-time exactly that.

However, I’m trying not to be like that anymore  – an egomaniac, that is.  But I still retain foibles from the old days.

Acting in a fashion that qualifies me as a “weirdo” is kind of an amalgam of all of the above.  I’m an extremist, so I’d rather be WAY different from everybody else than be just a little bit out-of-the-ordinary.  So sometimes I act out a bit in order to be…recognized as an individual.  I want to make an impression; I want to be remembered, not forgotten among the masses.  Case in point:  you’re reading it right now.

So.  That said, it follows as a corollary that I’ve kind of a loose tongue – or, if you will, keyboard – on facebook and other social media sites.

BUT:  I don’t consider the people I meet on said social media sites to be simply electronic forms of entertainment and avenues for my own selfish ego-feeding self-expression.  I consider the people I meet on these sites (e.g. facebook and Twitter) to be real people.  People with thoughts and feelings and idiosyncracies of their own.  People whose feelings I can and will hurt if I’m not careful with my words and how they may be construed.

And, call me naive, but I kind of expect the same in return.

I believe that there’s an actual person behind the avatar, and I try to treat the person behind the cartoon avatar from Walla Walla Washington or East Bumblef*ck Australia or Canada or wherever as I’d treat the person in the next cube over from me at work or in line at the Starbucks or next to me on the mat in yoga class.  I believe in karma.  If one of my friends from the aforementioned far-from-me locations were to pass through northern NJ, I’d certainly open my home to them.

That last statement may be pushing the line a bit when viewed in the converse – I can’t really say I’d expect one of my social media friends to open their home to me, but heck, is a little politeness on the internet too much to ask?

Anyway, the point of all this is that my feelings got hurt via the internet today, and I’m pretty sure it’s my own damned fault.  A friend of mine from Twitter rejected my friend request on facebook.  I know, I know, “Boo-hoo.  Cry me a river.  Somebody call the waa-aaaambulance.”

Oh well, I’m over it.  This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I think about having sex a lot.  Not always with your sister, but often.  I sometimes think about having sex with girls who are only-children too (by which I mean no siblings), so the your-sister-thing really can’t be called a proper fetish.  Fishnets and stilettos, maybe.  I would think adding leather corsets into the mix probably crosses that line.  Asians, red hair, black hair, glasses, muscles, intellect – all of these can be fetishes in themselves, so I think I qualify as ‘normal’ by default.  I.e. I’m uncategorizeable by the things to which I’m attracted.

I woke up this morning with some nasty knots in my shoulders and a prevailing thought was that I need to get laid.  It’s been a while.  This thought proceeded to take me into the realm of casual sex dating sites.  I backed out of that for a minute and went to massage (sans hand-release – what kind of weirdo do you think I am?).  I backed out of that one, too.  I’m thinking more yoga.

If yoga doesn’t work (even though I’m sure it will), maybe I’ll get a massage.  The good lord knows I always have knots in my shoulders; I consider them almost a badge of honor.  I won’t deny, though, that I could probably use a massage – kind of like a good cleaning of one’s car – using rubbing compound (no pun, sicko) – where necessary, followed by a coat of wax.  And then, of course, regular washing and waxing for maintenance purposes.

I guess what I’m saying is that I need an overhaul in my physical-energy body relations.

Don’t get me wrong:  I’d certainly dig getting laid as soon as possible; I’m just not sure that casual sex is the panacea my sick mind is cracking it up to be.  The few casual sex relationships I’ve had in these 32 years have really been all-but fulfilling.

Yes.  Definitely more yoga.  And maybe some more new age stuff in my life.

I’m taking vacation days on Thursday and Friday.  I think it’s also time to do some hardcore junk removal from my apartment and spend some time tinkering with this site.  I’ve been thinking about a new theme – by which I mean the overall template for the blog – any suggestions?

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

-Max Ehrmann (ca. 1927)

I did not go hiking on Sunday.  Which is to say that I did not go hiking today.  Or yesterday – I’m not sure when you’re reading this, dear reader, but seeing as how Monday officially began about ten minutes ago, I suppose I can’t really go wrong with saying that I didn’t go hiking yesterday.  By which I mean Sunday, though the statement is still correct, even though I still consider it Sunday because I haven’t gone to sleep yet.  What a pain in the ass time travel can be.

So yeah, Lone and Rocky Mountains still remain unsurmounted by the inexorable Ted Wallace.  But I’m coming, I can promise you that, dear mountains.  That’s why I get to call myself ‘inexorable’.  I know it’s a bit of arrogance on my part to so name myself, but what the heck, I’m master of this domain. 

I did get some exercise this weekend – took my kayak out on the Passaic this afternoon (by which I mean Sunday afternoon).  I acquired just the amount of sunburn for which I set out.  And I made it past the third bridge upstream of the Fair Lawn boat launch area:  the Lafayette Avenue bridge.  As before, it was a tough paddle.  The last time, the rain had swelled the river and the current was swift.  Today I think the river was back to normal, and the current was still tough to manage.  There were parts where my paddle was scraping the bottom, which was a new experience for me.  My arms are blood-filled and tired, and I’ve been doing my utmost to consume as much protein in the past few hours as possible.  I’ll tell ya, dear reader, whatever chilled piece of cow I bought for my dinner this evening was looking pretty good before I cooked it.  I’m giving some serious consideration to this whole ‘tartar’ thing.

But I digress.  As I was battling the current this afternoon, slowly gaining water on the next bridge in front of me, that’s the adjective that flowed through my mind:  inexorable.

If you’re reading this “Note” on Facebook, please note that these daily posts are not simply me wiling away my time via that particular medium – these are actually real-life blog posts on my website The Quixotic Jedi.  The “Notes” are just my RSS feed plugged into the Facebook machine.  If that pale shadow is all you’re accustomed to reading, feel free to check out these words at http://QuixoticJedi.com.  (Teaser:  the font is Georgia – chicks dig Georgia.)

In any case, today’s reading (by which I mean Sunday’s reading) in my zen-a-day calendar was a quote from Margaret Young:

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards:  they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier.

The way it actually works is the reverse.  You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

I’ve never heard of Margaret Young before.  Have you?  Whatever – the compiler of my zen-a-day calendar has a penchant for picking random quotes that he/she feels are zen-enough to qualify.  I’m not necessarily going to disagree about this one.

The sentiment is pretty easy to remember:  be-do-have, not have-do-be – right?

I’ve encountered this particular concept many a time, and can’t say as I disagree with it.  I think it’s pretty sound reasoning:  if I’m cool with my insides, being cool with my oustides will naturally follow. 

The tough part for me is figuring out how to put this into practice – especially since I do want to have more things (and more money), and there are lots of things I want to do, many of which require the whole more things or more money…um, thing.

My laments often go something like this:  “If I only knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d be doing that.”  I’m often jealous of those who have known since they were little kids that they want to be a writer or a stock broker or a garbage man.  I wasn’t born with that.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always admired my teachers, but neither do I feel that I’m yet qualified to teach, nor do I feel like locking myself into a teacher’s salary.  NOR do I have any desire to teach a group of semi- or completely unwilling students, in the hopes that I can make a difference in one person’s life (someone who truly wants to learn).  Besides, I spent so much of my development in school, it’s not much of a wonder that I don’t know much beyond the life of an academic.

I’d enjoy being an adventurer.  One of my current heroes:  Teddy Roosevelt.  I’m an Edward, by the way, neither a Theodore nor a Teddy.

If you’ve some free time, read the Wikipedia article on Roosevelt.  That mean old cuss lived a life to be envied.  If you’ve not the time to read the whole article, click this link, and scroll up two lines to read Thomas R. Marshall’s statement regarding Roosevelt’s death.

So anyway, please pardon the digression, dear reader.  The best I’ve come up with regarding putting the be-do-have thing into practice is as follows:  I try to stay in the moment.  I try not to dwell too much in the past, and not to project too far into the future.  I try to trust that I’m right where I’m supposed to be right now, and that the winds of fortune or change or whatever will blow me in the right -do- and -have direction, as long as I’m true to my be.

I’m pretty sure I’m over my “haven’t got a girl” whiney time.  I know that I only really whined for that one post, but that’s a lot for me.  For me to sit down and blog about being lonely means that it was weighing on my mind more than usual.  Whatever.  These things happen.  Thanks for bearing with me through that, dear reader.

To a certain extent, I carried that whiney-ness (yes, I’m sure it’s spelled “whininess”, but I think that looks dumb) right into Father’s Day with the family.  At that point, it was more of an intellectualization than anything else.  I talked to my family a bit about how I live in the middle of suburbia – soccer moms and lawn-mowing dads – instead of around people of a similar age and station in life.  I pondered aloud about moving to Hoboken or some other more city-ish locale, and we had a good sort of brainstorm sesssion.  “What are the possibilities for Ted’s future?”  It was pretty cool, except that I need to stop taking things so personally.  And I need to stop projecting the rest of my life out from this point forward.  Sometimes it’s tough for me to stick to just “doing the next right thing” – but when I do, life is phenomenal.

My dad’s biggest suggestion was “why don’t you go back to school?”  And get this, his idea was that I go get a PhD in Philosophy (of all things), and then enter the world of academia. 

My dad wasn’t too happy when I switched my major from Biology to Philosophy, once upon a time. 

Now, I’d love to get a PhD in Philosophy and teach.  And there’s a very good possibility that I’ll do so sometime later in life.  But for now, that just doesn’t work for me.  I just don’t think I have enough life experience (or money) to do so.  Which brings me to Saturday’s quote in my Zen-a-day calendar:

“The more one is absorbed in so-called philosopy, the greater one’s delusion and blindness.”  -Emanuel Swedenborg

Not necessarily an original thought.  And quite in keeping with my understanding of Zen. 

This quote is particularly applicable to me.  When I was in undergrad, studying Philosophy, I thought I was uncovering deep metaphysical truths – with my mind.  Oofa.  Friedrich Nietzsche aside, I don’t know what kind of deep truths about the world and reality I was uncovering from my opium-hazed closet of a room in the fraternity house, with a disgustingly full ashtray and my Mac in front of me.

That said, I still hold with many of the things I wrote those ten or more years ago about Perspectivism, Pragmatism, and Solipsism.  Which is exactly why I’m psyched to spend more of my time experiencing life than studying it.  My brain is always going anyway, and Philosophy is always present for me.  I’d rather enjoy that in the background while I’m actively pursuing squeezing all I can out of life.  I’ll sit down and write and talk and teach hungover and still-stoned college kids about all that stuff when I’ve got more grey hairs on my head than brown.  And when I’ve actually managed to hunt down and kill patience while on safari.

So let’s continue the theme of yesterday’s post, shall we?  Sometimes I wonder if this blog isn’t some kind of fancy-dancy prayer service of mine. 

I’m extremely grateful for the good advice that was offered to me in yesterday’s comments.  I’ve got two things on my mind:  how my prayers are answered, and my own stubbornness.

I’m also going to talk about god a little bit (I may also interchange this liberally with ‘the goddess’).  I’m still agnostic and all that, but sometimes it’s just easier to use the word ‘god’ for semantical purposes.  That is, it makes it easier for me to get my point across without constantly qualifying my statements, as I am wont to do anyway.  Feel free to substitute your own word for my three-letter choice at whatever time you feel you’re picking up what I’m putting down.  Fate or luck are very close to what I’m describing, but, as I said, I don’t want to get too far into semantics right now.

Most of this is going to end up being metaphorical, but wtf, that’s kind of what I do.  If you don’t get it, that’s ok, you’re probably not meant to.  No hard feelings – either way, I hope.

I walk a certain kind of path that I don’t really talk about here – and I’m not going to go into detail about it here and now.  Suffice to say that part of this path involves helping others along at certain times.  And with that come successes and failures – not mine and not theirs, and not really successes and failures exactly:  It’s really more of particularly fortunate days interspersed with some unfortunate or unpleasant ones.  In either or any of these cases, helping others along is intensely rewarding.

Over the last two years or so, I’ve noticed a kind of pattern:  as soon as I loose a prayer for a woman in my life – as I did to a certain extent in my last post – the goddess puts one of these others in my path.  It’s almost as if she’s saying “Not yet, Ted, but here’s a good way for you to stay occupied in the meantime”.

About 8 hours after I published yesterday’s post, I received a text message from a friend of mine – one from whom I hadn’t heard in a couple of months.   The last time I heard from him, he had asked me for help walking the path I walk, and I assented.  Then a few months passed with no word from him.  He asked me to meet him to talk, and I once again assented.  Long story short, we’re back where we left off, and it looks like the few hours a week I’ve been spending feeling lonely will once again be filled.

While I don’t think my prayer could have been much more specific, I think the goddess probably gets a kick out of filling the request behind the request.  Or rather, that what I want isn’t necessarily what she wants for me – and maybe not what’s best for me either.

The charge I get out of helping these others along this path is pretty indescribable.  And it’s really good for me, too, because it reminds me to keep reaching for the person I can be and want to be .

To paraphrase the first mystery (or whatever) in that new age hooey book The Celestine Prophecy “there are no coincidences”.  Or maybe closer, “pay attention to the things you think are just coincidences”.  Here’s the reading from my God Calling meditations reader from this morning:

June 18

Wait

The world has always seen service for Me to be activity.  Only those near to Me have seen that a life apart, of prayer, may, and does so often, accomplish more than all the service man can offer Me.

If man lived apart with Me and only went out to serve at My direct command, My Spirit could operate more and accomplish truly mighty things.

Anybody else get the vibe of “sometimes it’s ok to be a hermit”?  That’s how I read it this morning – and I felt a little better for it.

So that’s it for the prayers being answered aspect.  I know I’m being vague, but if I get more specific, we’ll be sure to see another “Scott hit with wall of text” comment – and we can’t have that, now can we, dear reader?

So.  On to my own stubbornness:

There’s a prayer with which I’m sort of intimately familiar.  I don’t have it memorized, though the thought’s crossed my mind a few times.  In some circles, it’s called the St. Francis Prayer.  It’s called other things in other circles, but that’s what I’m going to go with here.  It was written by St. Francis of Assisi and goes like this:

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace – that where there is hatred, I may bring love – that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness – that where there is discord, I may bring harmony – that where there is error, I may bring truth – that were there is doubt, I may bring faith – that where there is despair, I may bring hope – that where there are shadows, I may bring light – that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.  Lord, grant that I may seek to comfort rather than to be comforted – to understand, than to be understood – to love, than to be loved.  For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.  It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.  It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.  Amen.

I’m currently listening to some live Led Zeppelin – we’re at the end of Dazed and Confused and it’s just flying along.  It felt really good to type that out with my fingers in time with John Bonham’s beat.

There’s lots of good stuff in that prayer that helps me to remind me to watch out for my ego.  The one thing that rings particularly true – and that I pray often, because I need nothing short of divine help in this area – is “grant that I may seek…to understand [rather] than to be understood”. 

That’s a big problem for me.  I’m stubborn.  If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, I’ll pick it up and put it down again.  Then I’ll pick it up, fold it into a nice little origami turtle and put it down again.  Then I’ll pick it up, bunch it up, and throw it down – hard.  Et cetera.  I have a desire to be understood that’s exacerbated by my stubbornness.  And it can be pretty embarrassing sometimes.

People on Twitter right now are shading their avatars green to support democracy in Iran.  I noticed the green shading about a week or so ago, but haven’t spent much time on Twitter, so today was the first day that I actually found out what it meant.  I posted a couple of snide remarks, stemming from my own (fairly disgusted) apolitical views.  Apolitical, I said.  I’m not into politics or government in any way, shape, or form.

But I sure like to argue.  And I sure like to needle people.  Unfortunately, DarthTraya was one of the few who were paying attention to my tweets today – because she’s a friend.  Unlike me, DarthTraya has some pretty strong political views.  And I chose to needle her a bit about it.  Which wasn’t really all that nice – I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I could tell that I was getting her dander up a bit. 

This isn’t about whether my views (or lack thereof) conflict with DarthTraya’s, but rather that what my ego really wanted to do was get into an argument and convince her of the righteousness of my apoliticality.  I’m glad that I was handicapped by the 140 character limit on Twitter and that the combination of the character limit and my tendency toward loquaciousness frustrated me enough to break off the conversation.  I shouldn’t screw with the views that others hold dear, and I was well on my way to doing that today.  With a friend.  I’m sorry, DarthTraya.  I know I didn’t hurt your feelings or anything, but that still wasn’t right on my part.

I’ll leave the substance of my apolitical views for another post.  Believe you me, dear reader, it’s something I don’t think I’ll have a problem expressing.

In any case, partly in an attempt to avoid the aforementioned Scott-comment, and partly because it’s getting to be past my bedtime, I’m going to wrap this up:

My experience on Twitter this afternoon was a good reminder to me that I can still struggle with my ego’s desire to be understood.  And it was but one reminder:  My temptation to respond to the comments to yesterday’s post with something starting along the lines of “but you don’t understand…” was great.  By which I mean that I was greatly tempted.

The next couple of posts may be pretty easy ones for me, dear reader.  I do have some things to say in response to yesterday’s comments – though not necessarily in rebuttal.  In a sure-to-fail attempt at brevity:  I have considered the possibility that I’m waiting for my “ideal mate”.  That said, I think TNR’s advice was particularly poignant:  I am going to make a concerted effort to be less independent in the future.  Hopefully, one of the next few posts will be written from a local SBUX (though, by “local” I mean somewhere that’s likely to have chicks my age in it – like maybe Hoboken). 

So that’s it.  A two-paragraph wrap-up isn’t too bad.  Maybe I didn’t fail at the whole brevity thing after all.  ;-)

Thank you, dear reader, for putting up with my crap for the last couple of weeks.  As you know, work has been ridiculously busy.   Today was a 13-hour day, and it felt almost light.  As I was driving home from work this evening, I was trying to figure out whether this current period of my life is one that’s honing me for similar situations in the future, or whether it’s one of those times that all my work on myself in the past has been preparing me for.

Probably a little bit of both (duh). 

In the past few years, I’ve been working on deflating my ego.  Being all into self has gotten me into some pretty crappy spots in the past, and I’ve been trying to spend less time in my own head.  “Live in the moment” – “chop wood, fetch water, seek enlightenment”, as the zen saying goes.  Well, the ass-kicking that work has been dealing to me lately has been very good practice for staying out of my own head.  I just don’t have the time to sit around and think about how the world is affecting me.  I just am. 

Happily, I really don’t have much to say about the state of my ego.  I haven’t really been paying attention to it.  This time last year, I was about half as busy as I am now.  And I was pissed.  The single, constant thought that was on repeat in my head was (some variation of) “they’re not paying me enough money”.  Some form or another of this thought consumed me, except during the few hours of respite I’d get when work consumed me.

Now, work has totally consumed me.  Oh, those thoughts run through my head still, but I’m not spending any time with them.  I let the thought/feeling wash over and through me, and I’m not sad when it goes.  It’s not a productive type of thought, and I don’t have time for unproductive thoughts.

Overall, things have been pretty good.  My ego seems to be pretty well kept in check by the sheer amount of work I have to do.  When something happens that dings my ego, I’ve been noting it, but not really doing anything about it.  Just moving on to the next thing that needs to be done.

I really hope that this continues.  I’ve been pretty darned content.  I don’t know that the word serenity necessarily applies – that word carries a lot of weight with me.  I think, though, that I’ve achieved kind of a diluted form of serenity.

As far as the “little bit of both” thing goes: 

The result of past work:  I used to think that I was achieving serenity by repeating to myself “I really don’t care”, but I also kind of knew that that’s not what serenity is about.  Serenity is more of an “I’m ok with that” – but one has to be able to insert any damned thing in place of the ‘that’.  I’m pretty close to the latter right now.  There’s not a whole lot that bothers me, because I can’t afford to let anything bother me – I just don’t have the time.  So I think saying “I really don’t care” was more of a stepping stone for me to get to “I’m ok with that”, even though I still stumble over things that I’m not ok with.

Honing me for the future:  I said to my boss before the proxy season started that “I don’t know if I have another gear in me”.  After the last few weeks, I’ve found that I actually have several more gears in me than what I was working with last year.  I’m hoping I can take this modicum of serenity (however diluted it may be) with me as I move into the next phase of life – whatever that may be and wherever it may take me.

And so, to wit, the reading from my zen-a-day calendar this morning:

“When you Truly feel this equal love for all, when your heart has expanded so much that it embraces the whole of creation, you will certainly not feel like giving up this or that.  You will simply drop off from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree.  You will feel that the whole world is your home.”  -Rama Maharshi

I’m certainly not there yet.  Hell, I’m still hoping that chick from eHarmony emails me back and decides that there’s nothing more important in her life than having hot, steamy sex as many times as humanly possible with me this weekend.  Yeah, I’m glad I still have some work left to do on myself.  Being perfect is probably unbearably boring.

Yes, another post about that which I do not possess.  But it seems so cool!  It must be awesome to have faith.  Again, I’m talking about the kind of faith that works in all seasons, in all situations.  The kind that people who “walk with god” have.

Yeah, yeah, I know:  be careful what you wish for…

Well, I’m not wishing here; I’m hypothesizing.  And this hypothesis is about an evolution of faith.  I don’t think that it necessarily comes to those like me all at once - sure, there’s the “white light experience” and whatnot.  I’m not discounting that possibility.  It’s happened enough for other people.  I just don’t know that it would work for me.  I’m too much of a skeptic and a contrarian.  I’m the proverbial (or John-gospial) Doubting Thomas; though that dude believed after sticking his fingers in the holes.  I’d probably chalk the white light up to an aneurysm or something and be all psyched for my coming psychic powers and eventual death, like in Phenomenon.  Man, it would be cool to learn Brazilian Portuguese that fast!

So back to the hypothesis.  I think that faith comes to guys like me over time.  Through practice and repetition.  I suppose there’s worse karma to bear.  I’m not ready to give my will up to a higher power all at once; but I can do it in little bits and pieces.  A couple of situations here and a couple of situations there.  String them together and eventually I’m acting on faith for most of the time.  And who knows, maybe I string together a few years of complete faith just before I die.

I was discussing faith in terms of humility - or humility in terms of faith (take your pick) – with some friends not too long ago.  In that scenario, one asks/prays for something, but always remembers to append the request with “…if it be thy will”.  I think this is an excellent ego-deflation tactic, and I use it often.

I think that after doing this for a while, if one is truly attempting to align one’s will with that of one’s higher power, those prayers are answered in the affirmative (as opposed to in the negative or with “not yet”) more and more often.  After a while, one stops asking/praying for one’s own desires, and simply prays “thy will be done” – because that’s what one wants.

Tuesday’s reading in God Calling by A. J. Russell touches a bit on this.  And, if you’ll bear with me, dear reader, I think it can be linked to and – in a way – will bear out my hypothesis:

May 26:  Claim More

You are doing your claiming as I have said, and soon you will see the result.  You cannot do this long without it being seen in the material.  It is an undying law.

You are at present children practicing a new lesson.  Practice – Practice – soon you will be able to do it so readily.

You see others manifesting so easily, so readily demonstrating My Power.  But you have not seen the discipline that went before.  Discipline absolutely necessary before this Power is given to My disciples.  It is a further initiation.

You are feeling you have learnt so much that life cannot be a failure.  That is right, but others have to wait to see the outward manifestation in your lives before they realize this Spiritual Truth.

What I read from this is definitely not a “humble request” of the higher power, it says claiming – as though one had a right to it.  I think this is kind of the next step after the humble request.  That once one is walking with god and acting in concert with the will of a higher power all the time (notice I don’t say “on a regular basis”), these prayers/requests cannot but be fulfilled.  My will and god’s will are one.  Thus, the use of the term “claim”.  And all of a sudden, that “right” to something becomes “righteous” and takes on an entirely different meaning from that which we Americans usually view it (e.g. the Bill of Rights, right of privacy, right to free speech, etc.).

But all of this doesn’t happen overnight.  It comes through the practice and discipline of aligning one’s will with the higher power.  Which must necessarily have humble beginnings with the appendage “…if it be thy will”.  Like the effin Karate Kid, I don’t need to know that painting the fence or waxing the car or sanding the froor will help me block the punches and kicks that evil Johnny will eventually throw at me in the tournament:  I just need to know that Mr. Miyagi told me to paint the fence, wax the cars, and sand the froor.  I practice the motions with the faith that Mr. Miyagi knows what he’s doing and has a higher purpose for all this crap (other than whiter pickets, shinier cars, and smoother froors).  And keeping my mouth shut through all of this requires discipline, dear reader-san.

I’ll not here get into the real and metaphorical pain that’s involved in said discipline.

Q:  Does this fit with my zen-pragmatist views?  A:  Sure, why not.

A couple of days ago I was talking to some of the guys at work about Howard Stern – his show, his divorce, etc.  I remarked that my biggest takeaway from his movie Private Parts was that it seemed almost entirely dedicated to his wife.  I found a major overarching theme to be that his wife stuck by him through thick and thin.  And that despite all of the questionable situations he found himself in, Howard remained faithful never cheated on her. 

Which is why I was so surprised when I heard that they were getting divorced.  (Yes, I know this is old news, dear reader.)  If the movie was an accurate representation, it seems to me that the only reason his wife would ever leave him would be if he had cheated on her. 

Now, I didn’t do any research on this topic because, well, I just don’t care enough to find out.  It’s not so much the facts of the case that interest me as the underlying concept of cheating on one’s partner – and where the conversation with the guys at work went from there.  One guy said something along the lines of “if I were in that situation, with hot models and whatnot constantly throwing themselves at me, there’s no way I’d be able to remain faithful to my wife.”

Call me old-fashioned, but doesn’t that pretty much go against the entire concept of marriage?  This guy is married for many years with a couple of kids – I was totally taken aback at his statement.  I didn’t directly contradict him because, again, I just don’t care enough about his personal moral code to say anything.  But I’ll tell you what, dear reader, it definitely gave me a (fairly sickening) peek into his character.  I’m going to leave it at that – I’d rather not get into the implications of his statement.

During the relatively short time that I was married, I was a relatively popular bartender at a relatively busy bar in Washington DC.  I’m not a bad-looking guy now - I wasn’t back then either – and I had chicks absolutely throwing themselves at me all the time.  Never once did I consider cheating on my wife – even when we were “just dating”.  Even hammered out of my skull, the idea of sleeping with someone other than my partner turned my stomach (no pun, and no kidding).

Don’t get me wrong here:  I’m a dude, Y chromosome and all – I looked, but I didn’t touch.  Yeah, thoughts crossed my mind about what this- or that-girl would look like in her birthday suit, writhing in ecstasy under my bony frame, but they were fleeting thoughts that I didn’t pay much attention to – and acting on them wasn’t even a consideration.

So, yeah: I’m a monogamist through and through.  Whatever, I’m cool with it.  What I want to know is if I’m in the minority.  This is really something I should be emailing The Naked Redhead about, I think.  What do you think, TNR?  Am I a dying breed, or are there other dudes out there like me?  How about you, dear reader – what’s your opinion on the subject of cheating on a spouse/partner?

Sunday’s reading in my “God Calling” meditations book was pretty interesting:

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

My bravest are those who can anticipate the morning and feel in the night of sorrow that underlying Joy that tells of confident expectations of the morning.

I’m a contrarian striving to be objective, so when I read this, I see both sides.  I read it both ways.  When I’m sorrowful, I recognize that it will eventually pass, and try not to get too wrapped up in the unhappy feeling.  Likewise, when I’m joyful, I recognize that it, too, shall eventually pass, and try to enjoy the feeling while I have it.

If you’re reading this on Saturday morning, I’ll be in the Catskills, after a two week hiatus.  I can feel my need to be in the woods, closer to the goddess and working and sweating to achieve that closeness. 

A couple of weeks ago, I posted “Driven” late on Friday night, expecting to bushwack Kaaterskill High Peak in the morning.  Unfortunately, my body had other ideas.  I think I woke up around 8AM, realized I was too far behind schedule, and lay my head back down – not to pick it back up until the early hours of the afternoon.

Please read that post if you’re interested in where I’ll be hiking today.

This week has been crescedoing steadily and I’m not sure I’ve yet reached its peak.  No pun intended.  Work has been getting busier and busier for me, but I’m proud to report that I haven’t been freaking out and wasting time being over-anxious.  Along with work getting busy, I’ve managed to continue to fulfill my other daily commitments as well.

I think I’m currently struggling with my people-pleasing character defect – my desire to be “all things to all people”.  It was well that I posted about the Oxygen Mask Analogy earlier, as that has started to have particular significance in my life.  I need to take care of myself first, if I wish to be of any use to others.  If you read that post, I’m doing pretty well so far in my 30-day quest to eat breakfast, do pushups, and meditate every day.  I’ve slipped a bit with being purposeful about meditating, but that’s ok – this is a good reminder for me that I need to be more mindful of that promise to myself.

As far as my goals for the week go, I’ve made a good effort.  I still haven’t finished plugging my edits into Nicole’s novel, but I made a start and spent some time on that this week.  I’ve also spent some time searching for the missing piece to my car’s kayak-rack, even coming up with a separate solution – which didn’t work, but that’s ok too.  I made the attempt and it’s been raining all week, so I’m not kicking myself about not being prepared to kayak after work.  Things are still up in the air as far as wrangling a date or rejection out of a certain girl, but that’s fine as well – I made my attempt early in the week and am smart enough to recognize when the goddess is trying to teach me patience.  I’ve got a whole life ahead of me and really have no intention of feeling like a stalker.  Things will happen if/when they do.  Maybe I’ll start that Tai Chi DVD Saturday night – the week ain’t over yet.

Which brings me around to isolation.  I took care of my commitments this evening and pulled away from possible social engagements with friends.  I usually spend some time on Friday nights doing social things, but I recognized the need for a bit of decompression from the various stresses of the week.  I’m listening to some Bob Marley, which is a good change from my usual Metallica or J. S. Bach.  I’ve stayed true to Monday’s “Monday Monday” post and have shaken my routine up a bit this week – even though it went by as fast as the past several.  I made myself a solid dinner and am content to be alone tonight, not rushing to return emails or come up with a blog post topic.

I think I may now understand what the goddess was trying to tell me on Wednesday night when she pointed out that “a wise prince, marching the whole day, does not go far from his baggage waggons.  Although he may have brilliant prospects to look at, he quietly remains (in his proper place), indifferent to them.”  I can’t go running off half-cocked in search of every next thing that might bring me some pleasure for the moment.  For now at least, I need to stay close to home and diligently monitor the progress of the wagon-train of my life.  It’s time for me to stop setting new things in motion for a while and follow along with those aspects of my life that are already steadily rolling.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating:  there’s an excellent analogy I heard once-upon-a-time that regards self-care, and it goes like this:

There’s a reason why the oxygen mask instructions say to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your children:  if you spend your time trying to put it on your child first, you may pass asphyxiate before you can get it on the child, and then you both die.

By analogy to life, this means:

One has to take care of oneself first, otherwise one cannot be of use to others.

Being a person with some altruistic tendencies, many (if not most) of the things I do are with others in mind.  Shrink my head as much as you like – I won’t disagree that at some level my motives are selfish.  But there’s also a reason why this analogy resonates particularly strongly with me. 

I just read a blog post by Cynthia James that relates directly to this point.  Being possessed of a Y chromosome, and having read some of Marcus Aurelius‘ accounts of stoic philosophy, the term “self-nurturing” does not particularly appeal to me.  Nevertheless, I’m all about increasing my efficiency and effectiveness, so I’m going to give Cynthia’s suggestions a shot.

Cynthia asks that I create a list of three self-nurturing goals that I intend to accomplish (every day) over the next 30 days.  Here is my list:

1. I will have breakfast every day.  Breakfast for me usually consists of two raw eggs scrambled in a glass with some milk before I leave the house, and two granola bars when I get to work.  I keep the granola bars on my desk and am already pretty good about eating them every day, but I don’t always have the eggs before I leave the house – for some reason I think that those extra 3 minutes will make a crucial difference in what time I get to work.   I will not leave the house without the eggs in my belly.
2. I will meditate as soon as I get home for at least five minutes every day.  As a corrollary to this, I will also try to be home by 10 PM every day.  Eating dinner past 10:30PM has not been very good for me – and I’ve been doing that for a long time now.  Meditation will be in the form of yoga or simple zazen.
3. I will do pushups every day.  Probably the best time is first thing in the morning, but after meditation will be fine as well (it’ll help ground me, too).  Pushups are something that I already do on and off.  Besides being good exercise, they’ll also increase my upper-body muscle mass a bit, which will be good for my self-image.  I can currently do 35 pushups at a go – I hope to be at 50 by the end of the 30 days.

These are three things that are already somewhat in my schedule.  I’d rather, though, that they were something I did daily, instead of intermittently.  I’ll mark the date in my Outlook at work (per Cynthia’s suggestion) and let you know how I made out at the end of May.  Wow.  Coincidence that today is May 1st?  Maybe.  Some say there are no coincidences.

When I was in Sedona last July with Scott and his wife, I spent a lot of time thinking about my spirituality.  Sedona is kind of a center for modern-day spiritual activity on our continent, and I was very cognizant of this while I was there.  We visited many metaphysical bookshops, crystal shops, and psychic abodes.  The most moving experiences for me were the sweat lodge ceremony, the various hiking outings Scott and I went on, and the Amitabha Stupa.  I didn’t really “feel” anything at the various energy vortexes we visited, but I did at the Stupa.  Perhaps because it’s man-made.

I spent a lot of time while in Sedona trying to stay open to signs.  Emotionally/intellectually, I was in a pretty good space, so as I was reading about the different things that all the crystals in the crystal shops were supposed to be good for, nothing really jumped out at me.  Neither did any of the books in the various bookshops we visited. 

I did, however, come across a thin blue book called “At the Feet of the Master” by Alcyone (which, it turns out, is a pen name for Jiddu Krishnamurti).  I’ve reproduced the entire text of the copy of the book I found below (Source).  It’s a very short book.  I know it’s very long for a blog post, but I don’t really care – it’s important to me.

There’s nothing particularly special about the writing that jumped out at me.  Nor did I feel more enlightened or anything when I read it.  But I’m glad it’s so short, because I can easily carry it with me and read it in one sitting.  The principles it professes are nothing particularly new to me, but I find them to be a good reminder of things I “already know”.  This is the book I brought with me and read before the Soulive show a couple of weeks ago.

Without getting too hokey, I’m glad I read this book again a couple of weeks ago.  I was in a situation just the other day where I was extremely tempted to gossip, but the thought of one of the paragraphs in this book made me hold my tongue.  I was very surprised at the time. 

So ends my words in this post, and begins the words of another:

Preface

The privilege is given to me, as an elder, to pen a word of introduction to this little book, the first written by a younger Brother, young in body verily, but not in Soul. The teachings contained in it were given to him by his Master in preparing him for Initiation, and were written down by him from memory–slowly and laboriously, for his English last year was far less fluent than it is now. The greater part is a reproduction of the Master’s own words; that which is not such a verbal reproduction is the Master’s thought clothed in His pupil’s words. Two omitted sentences were supplied by the Master. In two other cases an omitted word has been added. Beyond this, it is entirely Alcyone’s own, his first gift to the world.

May it help others as the spoken teachings helped him–such is the hope with which he gives it. But the teaching can only be fruitful if it is lived, as he has lived it, since it fell from his Master’s lips. If the example be followed as well as the precept, then for the reader, as for the writer, shall the great Portal swing open, and his feet be set on the Path.

-Annie Besant

To Those Who Knock 

Foreword

These are not my words; they are the words of the Master who taught me. Without Him I could have done nothing, but through His help I have set my feet upon the Path. You also desire to enter the same Path, so the words which He spoke to me will help you also, if you will obey them. It is not enough to say that they are true and beautiful; a man who wishes to succeed must do exactly what is said. To look at food and say that it is good will not satisfy a starving man; he must put forth his hand and eat. So to hear the Master’s words is not enough, you must do what He says, attending to every word, taking every hint. If a hint is not taken, if a word is missed, it is lost forever; for He does not speak twice.

Four qualifications there are for this pathway:

• Discrimination
• Desirelessness
• Good conduct
• Love  

What the Master has said to me on each of these I shall try to tell you.

I

The first of these Qualifications is Discrimination; and this is usually taken as the discrimination between the real and the unreal which leads men to enter the Path. It is this, but it is also much more; and it is to be practiced, not only at the beginning of the Path, but at every step of it every day until the end. You enter the Path because you have learnt that on it alone can be found those things which are worth gaining. Men who do not know, work to gain wealth and power, but these are at most for one life only, and therefore unreal. There are greater things than these—things which are real and lasting; when you have once seen these, you desire those others no more.

In all the world there are only two kinds of people—those who know, and those who do not know; and this knowledge is the thing which matters. What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs–these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge–the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution. When once a man has seen that and really knows it, he cannot help working for it and making himself one with it, because it is so glorious, so beautiful. So, because he knows, he is on God’s side, standing for good and resisting evil, working for evolution and not for selfishness.

If he is on God’s side he is one of us, and it does not matter in the least whether he calls himself a Hindu or a Buddhist, a Christian or a Muhammadan, whether he is an Indian or an Englishman, a Chinaman or a Russian. Those who are on His side know why they are here and what they should do, and they are trying to do it; all the others do not yet know what they should do, and so they often act foolishly, and try to invent ways for themselves which they think will be pleasant for themselves, not understanding that all are one, and that therefore only what the One wills can ever be really pleasant for any one. They are following the unreal instead of the real. Until they learn to distinguish between these two, they have not ranged themselves on God’s side, and so this discrimination is the first step.

But even when the choice is made, you must still remember that of the real and the unreal there are many varieties; and discrimination must still be made between the right and the wrong, the important and the unimportant, the useful and useless, the true and the false, the selfish and the unselfish.

Between the right and wrong it should not be difficult to choose, for those who wish to follow the Master have already decided to take the right at all costs. But the body and the man are two, and the man’s will is not always what the body wishes. When your body wishes something, stop and think whether you really wish it. For you are God, and you will only what God wills; but you must dig deep down into yourself to find the God within you, and listen to His voice, which is your voice. Do not mistake your bodies for yourself—neither the physical body, nor the astral, nor the mental. Each one of them will pretend to be the Self, in order to gain what it wants. But you must know them all, and know yourself as their master.

When there is work that must be done, the physical body wants to rest, to go out walking, to eat and drink; and the man who does not know says to himself; “I want to do these things, and I must do them.” But the man who knows says: “This that wants is not I, and it must wait awhile.” Often when there is an opportunity to help some one, the body feels: “How much trouble it will be for me; let some one else do it.” But the man replies to his body: “You shall not hinder me in doing good work.”

The body is your animal–the horse upon which you ride. Therefore you must treat it well, and take good care of it; you must not overwork it, you must feed it properly on pure food and drink only, and keep it strictly clean always, even from the minutest speck of dirt. For without a perfectly clean and healthy body you cannot do the arduous work preparation, you cannot bear its ceaseless strain. But it must always be you who controls that body, not it that controls you.

The astral body has its desires—dozens of them; it wants you to be angry, to say sharp words, to feel jealous, to be greedy for money, to envy other people their possessions, to yield yourself to depression. All these things it wants, and many more, not because it wishes to harm you, but because it likes violent vibrations, and likes to change them constantly. But you want none of these things, and therefore you must discriminate between your wants and your body’s.

Your mental body wishes to think itself proudly separate, to think much of itself and little of others. Even when you have turned it away from worldly things, it stills tries to calculate for self, to make you think of your own progress, instead of thinking of the Master’s work and of helping others. When you meditate, it will try to make you think of the many different things which it wants instead of the one thing which you want. You are not this mind, but it is yours to use; so here again discrimination is necessary. You must watch unceasingly, or you will fail.

Between right and wrong, Occultism knows no compromise. At whatever apparent cost, that which is right you must do, that which is wrong you must not do, no matter what the ignorant may think or say. You must study deeply the hidden laws of Nature, and when you know them arrange your life according to them, using always reason and common-sense.

You must discriminate between the important and the unimportant. Firm as a rock where right and wrong are concerned, yield always to others in things which do not matter. For you must be always gentle and kindly, reasonable and accommodating, leaving to others the same full liberty which you need for yourself.

Try to see what is worth doing; and remember that you must not judge by the size of the thing. A small thing which is directly useful in the Master’s work is far better worth doing than a large thing which the world would call good. You must distinguish not only the useful from the useless, but the more useful from the less useful. To feed the poor is a good and noble and useful work, yet to feed their souls is nobler and more useful than to feed their bodies. Any rich man can feed the body, but only those who know can feed the soul. If you know, it is your duty to help others to know.

However wise you may be already, on this Path you have much to learn; so much that here also there must be discrimination, and you must think carefully what is worth learning. All knowledge is useful, and one day you will have all knowledge; but while you have only part, take care that it is the most useful part. God is Wisdom as well as Love; and the more wisdom you have the more you can manifest of Him. Study then, but study first that which will most help you to help others. Work patiently at your studies, not that men may think you wise, not even that you may have the happiness of being wise, but because only the wise man can be wisely helpful. However much you wish to help, if you are ignorant you may do more harm than good.

You must distinguish between truth and falsehood; you must learn to be true all through; in thought and word and deed.

In thought first; and that is not easy, for there are in the world many untrue thoughts, many foolish superstitions, and no one who is enslaved by them can make progress. Therefore you must not hold a thought just because many other people hold it, nor because it has been believed for centuries, nor because it is written in some book which men think sacred; you must think of the matter for yourself, and judge for yourself whether it is reasonable. Remember that though a thousand men agree upon a subject, if they know nothing about that subject their opinion is of no value. He who would walk upon the Path must learn to think for himself, for superstition is one of the greatest evils in the world, one of the fetters from which you must utterly free yourself.

Your thought about others must be true; you must not think of them what you do not know. Do not suppose that they are always thinking of you. If a man does something which you think will harm you, or says something which you think applies to you, do not think at once: ” He meant to injure me.” Most probably he never thought of you at all, for each soul has its own troubles and its thought turn chiefly around itself. If a man speak angrily to you, do not think: ” He hates me, he wishes to wound me.” Probably some one or something else has made him angry, and because he happens to meet you he turns his anger upon you. He is acting foolishly, for all anger is foolish, but you must not therefore think untruly of him.

When you become a pupil of the Master, you may always try the truth of your thought by laying it beside His. For the pupil is one with his Master, and he needs only to put back his thought into the Master’s thought to see at once whether it agrees. If it does not, it is wrong and he changes it instantly, for the Master’s thought is perfect, because He knows all. Those who are not yet accepted by Him cannot do quite this; but they may greatly help themselves by stopping often to think: “What would the Master think about this? What would the Master say or do under these circumstances?” For you must never do or say or think what you cannot imagine the Master as doing or saying or thinking.

You must be true in speech too—accurate and without exaggeration. Never attribute motives to another; only his Master knows his thoughts, and he may be acting from reasons which have never entered your mind. If you hear a story against any one, do not repeat it; it may not be true, and even if it is, it is kinder to say nothing. Think well before speaking, lest you should fall into inaccuracy.

Be true in action; never pretend to be other than you are, for all pretence is a hindrance to the pure light of truth, which should shine through you as sunlight shines through clear glass.

You must discriminate between the selfish and the unselfish. For selfishness has many forms, and when you think you have finally killed it in one of them, it arises in another as strongly as ever. But by degrees you will become so full of thought for the helping of others that there will be no room, no time, for any thought about yourself.

You must discriminate in yet another way. Learn to distinguish the God in everyone and everything, no matter how evil he or it may appear on the surface. You can help your brother through that which you have in common with him, and that is the Divine Life; learn how to arouse that in him, learn how to appeal to that in him; so shall you save your brother from wrong.

II

There are many for whom the Qualification of Desirelessness is a difficult one, for they feel that they are their desires—that if their distinctive desires, their likings and dislikings, are taken away from them, there will be no self left. But these are only they who have not seen the Master; in the light of His holy Presence all desire dies, but the desire to be like Him. Yet before you have the happiness of meeting Him face to face, you may attain desirelessness if you will. Discrimination has already shown you that the things which most men desire, such as wealth and power, are not worth having; when this is really felt, not merely said, all desire for them ceases.

Thus far all is simple; it needs only that you should understand. But there are some who forsake the pursuit of earthly aims only in order to gain heaven, or to attain personal liberation from rebirth; into this error you must not fall. If you have forgotten self altogether, you cannot be thinking when that self should be set free, or what kind of heaven it shall have. Remember that all selfish desire binds, however high may be its object, and until you have got rid of it you are not wholly free to devote yourself to the work of the Master.

When all desires for self are gone, there may still be a desire to see the result of your work. If you help anybody, you want to see how much you have helped him; perhaps even you want him to see it too, and to be grateful. But this is still desire, and also want of trust. When you pour out your strength to help, there must be a result, whether you can see it or not; if you know the Law you know this must be so. So you must do right for the sake of the right, not in the hope of reward; you must work for the sake of the work, not in the hope of seeing the result; you must give yourself to the service of the world because you love it, and cannot help giving yourself to it.

Have no desire for psychic powers; they will come when the Master knows that it is best for you to have them. To force them too soon often brings in its train much trouble; often their possessor is misled by deceitful nature-spirits, or becomes conceited and thinks he cannot make a mistake; and in any case the time and strength that it takes to gain them might be spent in work for others. They will come in the course of development—they must come; and if the Master sees that it would be useful for you to have them sooner, He will tell you how to unfold them safely. Until then, you are better without them.

You must guard, too, against certain small desires which are common in daily life. Never wish to shine, or to appear clever; have no desire to speak. It is well to speak little; better still to say nothing, unless you are quite sure that what you wish to say is true, kind and helpful. Before speaking think carefully whether what you are going to say has those three qualities; if it has not, do not say it.

It is well to get used even now to thinking carefully before speaking; for when you reach Initiation you must watch every word, lest you should tell what must not be told. Much common talk is unnecessary and foolish; when it is gossip, it is wicked. So be accustomed to listen rather than to talk; do not offer opinions unless directly asked for them. One statement of the Qualifications gives them thus; to know, to dare, to will, and to be silent; and the last of the four is the hardest of them all.

Another common desire which you must sternly repress is the wish to meddle in other men’s business. What another man does or says or believes is no affair of yours, and you must learn to let him absolutely alone. He has full right to free thought and speech and action, so long as he does not interfere with any one else. You yourself claim the freedom to do what you think proper; you must allow the same freedom to him, and when he exercises it you have no right to talk about him.

If you think he is doing wrong, and you can contrive an opportunity of privately and very politely telling him why you think so, it is possible that you may convince him; but there are many cases in which even that would be an improper interference. On no account must you go and gossip to some third person about the matter, for that is an extremely wicked action.

If you see a case of cruelty to a child or an animal, it is your duty to interfere. If you see any one breaking the law of the country, you should inform the authorities. If you are placed in charge of another person in order to teach him, it may become your duty gently to tell him of his faults. Except in such cases, mind your own business, and learn the virtue of silence.

III

The Six points of Conduct which are specially required are given by the Master as:

1. Self-control as to the Mind.
2. Self-control in Action.
3. Tolerance.
4. Cheerfulness.
5. One-pointedness.
6. Confidence.

[I know some of these are often translated differently, as are the names of the Qualifications; but in all cases I am using the names which the Master Himself employed when explaining them to me.]

1. Self-control as to the Mind. – The Qualification of Desirelessness shows that the astral body must be controlled; this shows the same thing as to the mental body. It means control of temper, so that you may feel no anger or impatience; of the mind itself, so that the thought may always be calm and unruffled: and (through the mind) of the nerves so that they may be as little irritable as possible. This last is difficult, because when you try to prepare yourself for the Path, you cannot help making your body more sensitive, so that its nerves are easily disturbed by a sound or a shock, and feel any pressure acutely, but you must do your best.

The calm mind means also courage, so that you may face without fear the trials and difficulties of the Path; it means also steadiness, so that you may make light of the troubles which come into every one’s life, and avoid the incessant worry over little things in which many people spend most of their time. The Master teaches that it does not matter in the least what happens to a man from the outside; sorrows, troubles, sicknesses, losses—all these must be as nothing to him, and must not be allowed to affect the calmness of his mind. They are the result of past actions, and when they come you must bear them cheerfully, remembering that all evil is transitory, and that your duty is to remain always joyous and serene. They belong to your previous lives, not to this; you cannot alter them, so it is useless to trouble about them. Think rather of what you are doing now, which will make the events of your next life, for that you can alter.

Never allow yourself to feel sad or depressed. Depression is wrong, because it infects others and makes their lives harder, which you have no right to do. Therefore if ever it comes to you, throw it off at once.

In yet another way you must control your thought; you must not let it wander. Whatever you are doing, fix your thought upon it, that it may be perfectly done; do not let your mind be idle, but keep good thoughts always in the background of it, ready to come forward the moment it is free.

Use your thought-power every day for good purposes; be a force in the direction of evolution. Think each day of some one whom you know to be in sorrow, or suffering , or in need of help, and pour out loving thought upon him.

Hold back your mind from pride, for pride comes only from ignorance. The man who does not know thinks that he is great, that he has done this or that great thing; the wise man knows that only God is great; that all good work is done by God alone.

2. Self-control in Action. – If your thought is what it should be, you will have little trouble with your action. Yet remember that, to be useful to mankind, thought must result in action. There must be no laziness, but constant activity in good work. But it must be your own duty that you do—not another man’s, unless with his permission and by way of helping him. Leave every man to do his own work in his own way; be always ready to offer help where it is needed, but never interfere. For many people the most difficult thing in the world to learn is to mind their own business; but that is exactly what you must do.

Because you try to take up higher work, you must not forget your ordinary duties, for until they are done you are not free for other service. You should undertake no new worldly duties; but those which you have already taken upon you, you must perfectly fulfill all clear and reasonable duties which you yourself recognize, that is, not imaginary duties which others try to impose upon you. If you are to be His you must do ordinary work better than others, not worse; because you must do that also for His sake.

3. Tolerance. — You must feel perfect tolerance for all, and a hearty interest in the beliefs of those of another religion, just as much as in your own. For their religion is a path to the highest, just as yours is. And to help all, you must understand all.

But in order to gain this perfect tolerance, you must yourself first be free from bigotry and superstition. You must learn that no ceremonies are necessary; else you will think yourself somehow better than those who do not perform them. Yet you must not condemn others who still cling to ceremonies. Let them do as they will; only they must not interfere with you who know the truth—they must not try to force upon you that which you have outgrown. Make allowance for everything; be kindly towards everything.

Now that your eyes are opened, some of your old beliefs, your old ceremonies, may seem to you absurd; perhaps, indeed, they really are so. Yet though you can no longer take part in them, respect them for the sake of those good souls to whom they are still important. They have their place, they have their use; they are like those double lines which guided you as a child to write straight and evenly, until you learned to write far better and more freely without them. There was a time when you needed them; but now that time is past.

A great Teacher once wrote; “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Yet he who has forgotten his childhood and lost sympathy with the children is not the man who can teach them or help them. So look kindly, gently, tolerantly upon all; but upon all alike, Buddhist or Hindu, Jain or Jew, Christian or Muhammadan.

4. Cheerfulness. — You must bear your karma cheerfully, whatever it may be, taking it as an honor that suffering comes to you, because it shows the Lords of Karma think you worth helping. However hard it is, be thankful that it is no worse. Remember that you are of but little use to the Master until your evil karma is worked out and you are free. By offering yourself to Him, you have asked that your karma may be hurried , and so now in one or two lives you work through what otherwise might have been spread over a hundred. But in order to make the best out of it, you must bear it cheerfully, gladly.

Yet another point. You must give up all feeling of possession. Karma may take from you the things which you like the best—even the people whom you love most. Even then you must be cheerful—ready to part with anything and everything. Often the Master needs to pour out His strength upon others through His servant; He cannot do that if the servant yields to depression. So cheerfulness must be the rule.

5. One-Pointedness. — The one thing that you must set before you is to do the Master’s work. Whatever else may come in your way to do, that at least you must never forget. Yet nothing else can come in your way, for all helpful, unselfish work is the Master’s work, and you must do it for His sake. And you must give all your attention to each piece as you do it, so that it may be your very best. The same Teacher also wrote: “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.” Think how you would do a piece of work if you knew that the Master was coming at once to look at it; just in that way you must do all your work. Those who know most will most know all that that verse means. And there is another like it, much older: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

One-pointedness means, too, that nothing shall ever turn you, even for a moment, from the Path upon which you have entered. No temptations, no worldly pleasures, no worldly affections even, must ever draw you aside. For you yourself must become one with the Path; it must be so much part of your nature that you follow it without needing to think of it, and cannot turn aside. You the Monad, have decided it; to break away from it would be to break away from yourself.

6. Confidence. — You must trust your Master; you must trust yourself. If you have seen the Master, you will trust Him to the uttermost, through many lives and deaths. If you have not yet seen Him, you must still try to realize Him and trust Him, because if you do not, even He cannot help you. Unless there is perfect trust, there cannot be the perfect flow of love and power.

You must trust yourself. You say you know yourself too well? If you feel so, you do not know yourself; you know only the weak outer husk, which has fallen often into the mire. But you –the real you –you are a spark of God’s own fire, and God, who is Almighty , is in you, and because of that there is nothing that you cannot do if you will. Say to yourself: “What man has done, man can do. I am a man, yet also God in man; I can do this thing, and I will.” For your will must be like tempered steel, if you would tread the Path.

IV

Of all the Qualifications, Love is the most important, for if it is strong enough in a man, it forces him to acquire all the rest, and all the rest without it would never be sufficient. Often it is translated as an intense desire for liberation from the round of births and deaths, and for union with God. But to put it in that way sounds selfish, and gives only part of the meaning. It is not so much desire as will, resolve, determination. To produce its result, this resolve must fill your whole nature, so as to leave no room for any other feeling. It is indeed the will to be one with God, not in order that you may escape from weariness and suffering, but in order that because of your deep love for Him you may act with Him and as He does. Because He is Love, you if you would become one with Him, must be filled with perfect unselfishness and love also.

In daily life this means two things; first, that you shall be careful to do no hurt to any living thing; second, that you shall always be watching for an opportunity to help.

First to do no hurt. Three sins there are which work more harm than all else in the world –gossip, cruelty, and superstition – because they are sins against love. Against these three the man who would fill his heart with the love of God must watch ceaselessly.

See what gossip does. It begins with evil thought, and that in itself is a crime. For in everyone and in everything there is good; in everyone and in everything there is evil. Either of these we can strengthen by thinking of it, and in this way we can help or hinder evolution; we can do the will of the Logos or we can resist Him. If you think of the evil in another, you are doing at the same time three wicked things;

1. You are filling your neighborhood with evil thought instead of with good thought, and so you are adding to the sorrow of the world.

2. If there is in that man the evil which you think, you are strengthening it and feeding it; and so you are making your brother worse instead of better. But generally the evil is not there, and you have only fancied it; and then your wicked thought tempts your brother to do wrong, for if he is not yet perfect you may make him that which you have thought him.

3. You fill your own mind with evil thoughts instead of good; and so you hinder your own growth, and make yourself, for those who can see, an ugly and painful object instead of a beautiful and lovable one.

Not content with having done all this harm to himself and to his victim, the gossip tries with all his might to make other men partners in his crime. Eagerly he tells his wicked tale to them, hoping that they will believe it; and then they join with him in pouring evil thought upon the poor sufferer. And this goes on day after day, and is done not by one man but by thousands. Do you begin to see how base, how terrible a sin this is? You must avoid it altogether. Never speak ill of any one; refuse to listen when any one else speaks ill of another, but gently say: “Perhaps this is not true, and even if it is, it is kinder not to speak of it.”

Then as to cruelty. This is of two kinds, intentional and unintentional. Intentional cruelty is purposely to give pain to another living being; and that is the greatest of all sins – the work of a devil rather than a man. You would say that no man could do such a thing; but men have done it often, and are daily doing it now. The inquisitors did it, many religious people did it in the name of their religion. Vivisectors do it; many schoolmasters do it habitually. All these people try to excuse their brutality by saying that is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all. In India at least there can be no excuse for such customs, for the duty of harmlessness is well-known to all. The fate of the cruel must fall also upon all who go out intentionally to kill God?s creatures, and call it “sport.”

Such things as these you would not do, I know; and for the sake of the love of God, when opportunity offers, you will speak clearly against them. But there is a cruelty in speech as well as in act; and a man who says a word with the intention to wound another is guilty of this crime. That, too, you would not do; but sometimes a careless word does as much harm as a malicious one. So you must be on your guard against unintentional cruelty.

It comes usually from thoughtlessness. A man is so filled with greed and avarice that he never even thinks of the suffering which he causes to others by paying too little, or by half-starving his wife and children. Another thinks only of his own lust, and cares little how many souls and bodies he ruins in satisfying it. Just to save himself a few minutes? trouble, a man does not pay his workmen on the proper day, thinking nothing of the difficulties he brings upon them. So much suffering is caused just by carelessness-by forgetting to think how an action will affect others. But karma never forgets, and it takes no account of the fact that men forget. If you wish to enter the Path, you must think of the consequences of what you do, less you should be guilty of thoughtless cruelty.

Superstition is another mighty evil, and has caused much terrible cruelty. The man who is a slave to it despises others who are wiser, tries to force them to do as he does. Think of the awful slaughter produced by the superstition that animals should be sacrificed, and by the still more cruel superstition that man needs flesh for food. Think of the treatment which superstition has meted out to the depressed classes in our beloved India, and see in that how this evil quality can breed heartless cruelty even among those who know the duty of the brotherhood. Many crimes have men committed in the name of the God of Love, moved by this nightmare of superstition; be very careful therefore that no slightest trace of it remains in you.

These three great crimes you must avoid, for they are fatal to all progress, because they sin against love. But not only must you thus refrain from evil; you must be active in doing good. You must be so filled with the intense desire of service that you are ever on the watch to render it all around you—not to man alone, but even to animals and plants. You must render it in small things every day, that the habit may be formed so that you may not miss the rare opportunity when the great thing offers itself to be done. For if you yearn to be one with God, it is not for your own sake; it is that you may be a channel through which His love may flow to reach your fellow men.

He who is on the Path exists not for himself, but for others; he has forgotten himself, in order that he may serve them. He is as a pen in the hand of God, through which His thought may flow, and find for itself an expression down here, which without a pen it could not have. Yet at the same time he is also a living plume of fire, raying out upon the world the Divine Love which fills his heart.

The wisdom which enables you to help, the will which directs the wisdom, the love which inspires the will—these are your qualifications. Will Wisdom and Love are the three aspects of the Logos; and you who wish to enroll yourselves to serve Him, must show forth these aspects in the world.

Waiting the word of the Master,
     Watching the Hidden Light;

Listening to catch His order
     In the very midst of the fight;

Seeing His slightest signal
     Across the heads of the throng;

Hearing His faintest whisper
     Above earth’s loudest song.

Every morning, I read from two different sets of meditations.  This is the third year in a row that I’ve been reading from the Page-a-Day Zen calendar (“zen-a-day” in my head) – each year, the readings are different.  The other slot is a rotating one.  This year, “God Calling” by A. J. Russell fills that role.  It’s a very Catholic reader – which is not exactly my cup of tea (I’m agnostic), but it was a gift and I had an opening for 2009. 

Though I characterize myself as agnostic, I’m also a seeker.  I’m searching for god.  I drink in the experiences of others, and revel in my own.  I can’t really say that I’m getting “somewhere”, but I’m certainly not where I was.

I’ll start with yesterday’s reading from the latter set of meditations, and then move to the former.  And I’ll only paraphrase the “God Calling” reading, repeating the words that really spoke to me yesterday:

First Reading

You will conquer.  Do not fear changes…

As breathing rightly, from being a matter of careful practice, becomes a habit, unconsciously, yet rightly performed, so if you regularly practice this getting back into My Presence, when the slightest feeling of unrest disturbs your perfect calm and harmony, so this, too, will become a habit, and you will grow to live in that perfect consciousness of My Presence, and perfect calm and harmony will be yours.

Life is a training school.  Remember, only the pupil giving great promise of future good work would be so sinigled out by the Master for strenuous and unwearied discipline, teaching and training…

…take this training, not as harsh, but as the tender loving answer to your petition.

I read these meditations in the morning while I’m getting dressed.  I’m not a “morning person”, so I’m half-asleep and generally operating on auto-pilot when I read them.  Which, in the case of “God Calling” is probably for the best, because it’s quite dogmatic – and I don’t mix well with dogma.

What struck me this morning was the discussion of regular practice, with the example of breathing rightly.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a yoga practitioner and a student of zen.  Both of these schools stress meditation, and consciousness of the breath is always among the first lessons in any kind of meditation. 

In school, I hated taking beginner classes.  I attended a few classes in psych 101 and started counting the days to the next term, trying to figure out how to get into abnormal psych – a 300 level class – without taking any 200 level classes.  Same for philosophy, biology, and any other damned subject I found interesting.  I read the first few chapters of a book on zen and started daydreaming about the koans I would put to my students and whether or not I could get away with slapping them in answer to their questions, as so many other zen masters did.  A couple of beginner yoga classes, and I was looking for literature on how many hours I needed before I could teach (lol - and what cool “yoga name” would be my handle).

See the pattern?  I do.  I attempt to skip from beginner to master without dealing with the mundanity of the intermediate levels.  And I’m usually successful, though I generally have to go back to teach myself the intermediate levels while I’m trying to keep up with the advanced levels – I learn everything, as I should; but I do it the hard way, and it takes longer.

But I digress.  I’m currently working on not attempting mastery of entire fields of study at once.  It’s uncharacteristic, but I’m trying to take (and I hate this term:) baby-steps in my current endeavours.  Which is why yesterday’s reading got through my sleep-deprived morning haze:  I’ve been practicing “right breathing” more. 

That’s it.  Five paragraphs to get to those last six words.  So much for practicing brevity.  And being conscious of my breath as the beginning of meditation is where I’m at in my studies of zen and yoga.  But this is just an example that, like a fractal, is one small piece of the overall picture of the habits I’m trying to develop.  I’m doing so in small bits, but every day.  And I’m taking joy in doing so.

Second Reading

The second reading from yesterday was a Khalil Gibran quote:

Work is love made visible.  And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

An apropos reading, as I’ve been concerned about my work ethic in the past couple of weeks.  I’ve been spending more time than I’d like messing around on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, instead of finding more work to do at work.  And I’ve been rationalizing this behavior.

As with right breathing and the other good habits I’m attempting to acquire, this is a bad habit that I’ve acquired through practice.  And now I have to undo it by forming a good habit to take its place – and do so with practice.  Which means that I can’t get all pissed at myself for not walking into work and keeping my nose to the grindstone the whole time.  That all-or-nothing attitude that I’ve had in the past does me no good – because I’ll end up saying effit and settling for nothing and social media distraction all day.  Instead, yesterday I did just a little more work at work than I did on Monday; and just a little less messing around on the internet than I did on Monday.  And I’ll continue this practice tomorrow, until I’m back to where I used to be – working hard at work to further my career.  Because I’m not an alms-taker.

As I did yesterday, tomorrow I’ll do these things with joy.

“So a try-mind is more important than any Zen master.  If you say “I can,” then you can do something.  If you say “I cannot,” then you cannot do anything.  Which do you like?”  -Seung Sahn

“Do or do not, there is no try.”  -Jedi Master Yoda

The title of this blog and Didi’s incorrect assumption aside, we’ve all heard Yoda’s statement at one point or another.

So the question here is, who’s more correct, Yoda or Seung Sahn?  Do we need a try-mind, or should the concept of “try” not even be in our vocabulary?

I don’t know that the two are necessarily incompatible.  I think both are saying the same thing.  Yoda doesn’t put a time-limit on “do”.  As much as I hate to do it, I’m going to quote one of my old man’s coffee mugs: “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”  If I assume that something isn’t worth trying – that the inevitable outcome will be “failure” – then I’ve effectively failed before even beginning.

If I assume the opposite, and put failure out of my mind, I’ve succeeded no matter the result.  I learn from each attempt, which is a kind of success in itself.

I’m not necessarily saying that if I attempt enough times, I’ll succeed in pulling an X-Wing out of the swamp with my mind.  But I am saying that the more calls I make, the better I’ll get at closing a client; the more shots I take from the foul line, the more often I’ll make them – I’ll have learned what not to say; how not to shoot the ball.

I don’t learn but by making mistakes.  If I don’t get out there and try something, I’ll never succeed at it.  And sometimes, I even succeed on the first try.

I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time playing Mafia Wars on Facebook lately.  And by “inordinate” I mean probably around 1/2 an hour per day – which is kind of a lot of time for me to spend on anything that’s not work- or blog-related.

Mafia Wars is pretty simple, but can be time consuming – like life.  If I’ve found a point to the game at all (like life), it’s to level-up by accumulating “experience points”.  Life is all about experience for me – trying new things and getting more experienced at the ones I’ve already done.

Here’s a link to the rules of Mafia Wars, if you want full details (or want to try it out yourself).  What follows is a run-through of the basics.  I disclaim any and all responsibility for your impressions of the game itself.

Mafia Wars:

You’ve got limited resources – health, energy, stamina, money.  Health and stamina are used for “fighting”, which includes both “attacking” and “robbing” others playing the game.  I won’t get into the “hired gun” aspect here.  Both attacking and robbing (if successful) will yield you money and experience points, but will deplete your health and stamina.  Your health is depleted by some metric unknown to me, and your stamina is depleted by one each time you attack or rob someone.  You can spend money to heal your character at the hospital – talk about instant gratification.

Money can buy weapons, vehicles, and property, but not experience.  Properties add to your income on a regular basis.  As in life, some of your weapons, vehicles, and property have “upkeep” – which amounts to a debit of your accounts.  Speaking of money, there’s also a bank (which takes a 10% “laundering fee” on deposits) – so you’re not walking around with all your money in your pocket.  If you’re not using the bank, it’s possible to lose all your money when another player attacks you.

So besides fighting and robbing, the other (and more efficient) way to get experience points is to “do jobs”.  Doing jobs depletes your energy.  Energy is replaced one point every 2 minutes, and you can’t buy more.  As you “master” jobs and level-up, you get “profile” points, which you can use to increase your maximum health, energy, stamina (and the “attack” and “defense” capabilities of your character).

You also have a “mafia”, which is your network of other players.  The number of mafias you’re in depends upon how many people invite you, and vice-versa.  Your maximum number of mafia members is 501.  I don’t have that many friends – on Facebook or in life.  Anyone can be in your mafia, but only a select few can be in your “top mafia”.  The number of players in your mafia - and the levels of each of those in your top mafia – give you an upper-hand in fighting and robbing (and allows you to share in the spoils of other’s victories).

Life:

In life, I have limited resources – time, energy, money, etc.  “Levelling-up” in life is not nearly as simple as in Mafia Wars, but it consists of similar aspects.  I have to be efficient in my use of my resources.  I can’t spend all my time on one thing, or I’ll get burned-out and neglect the other aspects of my life, which can be just as fulfilling.

In life, money can buy me things that enhance my experiences or allow me to experience new things.  Buying a kayak allows me to learn something new, meet new people, and get exercise.  Buying a car allows me to get to new places.  Buying new clothes allows me to make a good impression when I meet new people.  Et cetera, and so on.  Some of these things are analagous to the property feature of Mafia Wars, in that they in some way or another enable me to increase my income.

But money is a limited resource and, as in Mafia Wars, I have to “do jobs” to get it.  Energy is also a limited resource in Mafia Wars and in life.  I have to be careful in how I expend my energy in both.  In Mafia Wars, I can’t keep doing the same job over and over again.  I have to master each job individually before I can master the level.  The same goes for life.  I have to prioritize my tasks at work and spread my energy out over many things.  If I spend all my time doing the same thing over and over, I may well master a particular aspect of a particular task, but I’m then neglecting other duties and not getting any good at them.  I also have to prioritize among work, blogging, and recreation.  I have to find a balance among these things.

Without getting too far into the analogy – which, believe me, is something I can certainly do – the biggest thing I’ve learned from Mafia Wars is that I have to spend some money to get some money.  I have to spend money on clothes, gear for recreational activites, car washes, and the like.  Feeding money into a bank account and sitting on it doesn’t hatch money-babies, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, dear reader. 

I also have to continually try new things.  Besides simply having new experiences, trying (and succeeding or failing) new things keeps my brain loose and allows me to better accomplish things in the future.  It also keeps me from being paralyzed by fear of the unknown. 

All that said, here’s a final tip:  Mafia Wars is a metaphor for life, it is not life itself.  No less than three people have promoted me to “mastermind” in their top - presumably based on the fact that they’re aware of my Mensa membership.  Promote the member of your mafia who has the highest level to mastermind – the smart guy in real life isn’t necessarily the most successful character in Mafia Wars.

So by writing the name once again, I’m officially giving my ascent of Fir Mountain way more pixels than it deserves – the mountain or the ascent.  

I had a great day yesterday.  Woke up at about a quarter after five – fifteen minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off – got dressed, and headed out the door.  I was so ahead of schedule that I had to drink Dunkin’ Donuts “coffee” on the way up to the Catskills.  My local SBUX doesn’t open until 6AM, and I have no idea what time the one at the Sloatsburg rest area opens – but it was after 6 when I got there.  Today was actually the first day in recent memory that I didn’t have any SBUX coffee – I wonder if there’s a support group out there for which I now qualify.

But I digress.

And now that I think about it, let me give you a quick overview of why yesterday was a great day – for those of you who don’t dig my verbosity.  Fir was all bushwack, which means that I walked into the woods with just a map and a compass, signed in at the canister at the summit, and walked back out of the woods – about a 4 mile round-trip – without setting foot on a trail.  Pretty good for a guy with no sense of direction.  It was a great experience because I was prepared - I had the gear, experience, and physical fitness to accomplish my goal.  I took care of a few responsibilities via phone on the way back home, and spent the afternoon dozing in bed and trading voicemails and text messages with Sabrina.  We never did get a chance to get together.  I met up with some friends in the evening and and was really grateful for actually living the maxim of “you’ve got to put on your own oxygen mask on yourself before you can put one on anybody else.”  (explanation forthcoming)

Ascent/Descent of Fir Mountain

I’ve done several bushwacks before; conceptually, they’re all pretty much the same.  “Bushwacking” basically means walking in the woods without the aid of a trail and attendant directional signals called “blazes” on the way.  For a guy totally lacking any sense of direction, bushwacking is quite a daunting prospect.  As I’ve mentioned before, the sense of accomplishment I get from bushwacking to the top of a mountain is incredible.

In today’s case, I was only climbing one mountain, so my land navigational skills weren’t put as much to the test as they have been in the past (e.g. navigating from the car to the summits of more than one mountain, and then back to the car).  There is one basic rule to follow when considering single-mountain ascents: the rule of “up”.  Just keep going up (dickhead) until you’re at the top.  Easy enough: go up the hill really fast; if something gets in your way, turn. 

It was raining off and on to varying degrees today.  Whether it was raining at any given moment or not, everything (trees, bushes, branches, rocks, leaves, snow) was wet the whole time.  As I mentioned previously, I had the right gear for this: waterproof jacket, teflon pants, gaiters, and waterproof boots.  Hiking while wet all the way through is a completely miserable experience – trust me.  No matter how waterproof, everything is a little bit heavier when wet.

I made it to the summit easily enough.  The descent was the tough part – which made this one of the toughest bushwacks I’ve done so far.  After signing in at the canister, I used my map and compass to take my bearing back to the car: about 15 degrees north-northeast.  And proceeded to hike south for a couple of hundred yards.  Yeah.  No sense of direction, remember?  I lost a couple of hundred feet of altitude before checking my compass again (to be sure I was still going the right way).  Basically, I had to hike in a semi-circle around the summit to get back to the other side.  And the semi-circle I had to hike was along a pretty steep ridge – going up or down a ridge like this is certainly daunting, but going across is much more of a pain in the ass.

Here’s where my experience came into play: 

First, even though I felt like I was going in the right direction when I was headed south, I knew enough to trust my instruments – that magnetic north hadn’t changed.  Second, I’m able to read a map and approximate my location via instrumental and environmental clues.  Third, I’ve been turned-around before and made it out ok.  I knew which in which direction I needed to head and that the hike was going to take a little bit longer than I anticipated, and I didn’t freak out.  Having no sense of direction, being lost is a pretty big fear of mine.  I took it slow, knowing that a twisted or broken ankle wouldn’t get me out any faster.  And fourth, I made sure that I ate all day long – “stoked my furnace” on the car ride up, and ate what I brought with me while I was on the mountain. 

The hike took longer and was a lot harder than I anticipated, but again, I was prepared.  I put an extra layer on when I started my descent, because I knew I wasn’t going to be exerting myself as much as on the way up.  I switched gloves when one set got wet.  I had plenty of food and water (and I consumed both).

Prayer

As I’ve said I-don’t-know-how-many-times, I’m not a “god guy”.  I’m agnostic.  That said, even though I’m also a destination hiker, I always find time to stand quietly and enjoy my surroundings while I’m alone in the woods.  When I’m doing this, I usually pray aloud.  I don’t have any set prayers that I recite, but I usually hit a couple of main themes:  “thanks” (for the day, the woods and mountains around me, current and past experiences, etc.) and “guide me”.  I usually begin these prayers with and address them to the “Great Spirit”.  I used to ask for protection and guidance, but the protection thing made me feel like a wuss, so now I just ask for guidance. 

Guidance to help me recognize opportunities for growth – spiritual and otherwise – and opportunities to recognize where I can be of maximum service to the world around me.

I sometimes pray for selfish things – a girl, money, success – but they generally ring hollow, and I figure if I can get the aforementioned guidance, the selfish things will either follow, or they’ll turn out to be things I didn’t want/need anyway.

I’ve found that this type of prayer works well for me.  If I do so while I’m hiking, I generally find that I am able to recognize the opportunities over the course of the week that follows.

The Oxygen Mask Maxim

Goes something like this:  If I’m on a plane that loses air pressure and the oxygen masks come down, I have to put my own mask on before I can put it on the child sitting next to me.  Selfish though it may sound, if I don’t put mine on first and pass out while trying to put on the child’s mask, we both die.

I spoke with several friends today and was able to give good advice and (hopefully) say the right things when speaking to them because I’ve been living this maxim.  I’ve been taking care of myself first, instead of being a people-pleaser all the time.  I’m happy to say that I’m living up to my professed change of attitude of which I spoke in Ramble On.  I had a great day yesterday (and a great weekend overall) because I took care of the things I needed to take care of – which allowed me to be there when other people needed my help.

“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”

-George Santayana

Juxtaposition:

As Garth said in Wayne’s World 2:  “We fear change.”

So what’s it going to be – fear of change or the embracement thereof? 

To take Santayana’s statement (maybe a bit too) literally, I’m a pretty big fan of the changing seasons.  I like that I live in a geographic region that has four different seasons.  You’ll rarely find me complaining about the weather – yearning for summer in the middle of winter.  This may very well be because I’m also a contrarian:  when I hear people complain about the cold and say “I can’t wait for the summer”, I usually think in the opposite direction.  I accept the winter for what it is – and that it will eventually give way to spring.  Those who wish for the summer in the midst of winter are invariably the ones who complain of the heat in the summer.

As I grow older, I find that I’m more aware of the fact that the seasons are not as distinct as I once thought.  That the season is changing every day.  As winter approaches, I’m aware that the days are getting shorter, and I try to spend some time drinking in the sunlight with my eyes during the day.  It’s been around 32 degrees in the morning for the last few days, even though we just tripped over the winter/spring line.  I’ve been noticing that the days are getting longer since the solstice.  It feels good to be in tune with the world around me.

In a figurative sense, Santayana’s statement is a good reminder to me that change is the only true constant.  I am different today that I was yesterday; different now than I was five minutes ago – even though these changes may be imperceptible, they’re still happening.  I’m happier when I embrace the flux.  It becomes painful to hold on to what was – eventually, if not immediately.  That pain comes from the fear of change – fear of the new and different.

I am agnostic.  An agnostic?  Whatever.  I’m open-minded about…well, everything.  Technically, this makes me a fence-sitter:  I neither believe nor disbelieve in “god”.

Agnosticism basically says that there’s no way to objectively “prove” the existence or nonexistence of a deity (or deities).  This is not athiesm, which argues that there is no god.  Nor is it any kind of theism, which would argue for the existence of a supreme being or beings or ultimate intelligence or whatever.

Agnosticism is the total middle-ground; it can be interpreted as that razor-line between belief and “disbelief”.

I think both sides of the argument are too, well, one-sided.  Neither takes into account the possibility that the other might be right.  And I can’t get with that.  I generally try to stay open to the idea that I might be wrong – about pretty much anything and everything.

So I suppose that in the case of my agnosticism, it could be argued that I’m definitely wrong – god either is, or isn’t, right?  Ponder that for a bit, then ponder this:

I don’t care.

Good for you if you have faith in the divine.  I hope it keeps you warm at night: that’s what it’s supposed to do.  If anything, I’d prefer to be on your team.  However, there’s just something about blind faith that doesn’t appeal to me.  Maybe it’s because I tend to be an extremist, and the extreme end of faith is just too anti-pragmatic for me (it just about borders on determinism).  Consider these:

1. God is omniscient.
2. God is omnipotent.
3. God is omnibenevolent.
4. Evil exists.

Let’s say you’re some sort of theist, and you agree that all 4 postulates are true.  There’s a contradiction here:  if god is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, then how can evil exist?  This mostly turns on the omnipotence and omnibenevolence aspects:  why would a being completely capable of eradicating evil allow something non-good to exist?  Because without evil, we wouldn’t know what good is?  You need the dark to know the light?

Hell if I know.  I took these from my freshman year Philosophy of Religion class (it was probably a 200-level class).  Makes sense, no?  Or rather, it doesn’t make logical sense.

I’m not really all that worried about it.

And good for you if you’re an athiest: you live in “the real world”.  No ultimate judgment, no consequences in the “hereafter”.  You consider yourself a true pragmatist.

I don’t.

I think you’re probably more closed-minded than the theists.  Athiests close their minds to too many possibilities for me.  And don’t try to get argumentative with me and talk about the Tao or energy flow (prana/chi/whatever).  All of those are just the first steps in that slick slope to some sort of theism.  To get away from it, you have to dig your heels in and screw your face up like a little kid who doesn’t want to take his/her medicine.  At the end, it’s either tautologies all the way down, or you just say “NO!” a little too adamantly to be believed (sorry, emotion doesn’t work in logic exercises).  Spend some time with your therapist and work out your catholic schooling issues.  Most of the athiests I’ve met say they “don’t believe in god” because they want to be contrarian.  Go ahead, be contrarian. 

I don’t care.

Athiesm’s a cold place to be when you’re sick, hurt, dying, or in real real-life trouble.

Agnosticism’s a cold place all the time, but at least it’s consistent.  After a while, I really don’t feel the cold anymore:  like an autumn day when the sun is shining.  If I stand still, the sun warms me, despite the chill in the air.  It can be rough when the wind’s blowing, but that’s why I try to dress appropriately.  I feel safe in being non-committal.

“To each, his own.”

My favorite sister Katie made me a mix of Outkast songs, um, maybe a year ago.  It’s a great cd to pump when riding down the street with the windows down.  It’s also a great pick-me-up mix.  Real hip-hop, which in my mind is defined as “happy rap”.  One of the songs on the cd is “Funkin’ Around“, and I’ve had a few lines stuck in my head for the past couple of weeks that I’d like to share with you:

one slash one slash ninety-one
my teacher sees potential in me, says sit down son
now let me tell you like I heard it, when I felt deserted
it wasn’t no other way to word it got my feelings murdered
by the the bullet of bad the singer of sad
songs to make you long for your mum and your dad
plaid clash with polka dots I hope you ain’t mad
back up little mama I’m about to react

My sincere apologies to Katie, Dan, Gino, and Christine, as they had to endure my endless repetition of these lines on Saturday night. 

Overall, this is a great track; it’s got a great P-Funk sound to it.  The thing I dig about these lines is the mental picture I paint:  Adre3000 has or had someone in his life that he looked up to and respected - the “teacher” – and this person took time out of his or her day to bring Andre up out of the doldrums.  The teacher recognizes “the potential” in Andre, which means that on some level the teacher identifies with Andre.  And Andre views this identification by someone he respects as a compliment.

The teacher says “sit down son”, which means that the teacher is being pro-active and taking time out of his or her day to pass something on to Andre.  Andre didn’t go to the teacher and ask for help or advice, the teacher is offering to share his or her experience with Andre.  The thing I dig about this is that it makes me feel good to think that there are people like this “teacher” in the world.  I’ve often pulled aside someone with whom I’ve identified and offered my own experience as a salve to help them deal with whatever they’re going through at the time.  I’ve only ever done so from an altruistic motive.  It makes me feel good to think that there are other people in the world who act from altruistic motives. 

Without getting too cynical, it’s been a rare occasion in my life that someone I respect has pulled me aside to share their experience with me – strictly for my benefit.  I’ve always been told that I have a lot of potential in me, but I’m usually told this in a disdainful manner.  “You have potential” is generally followed immediately by “but…”  Those that I’ve looked up to and respected who have recognized the potential in me generally view that potential as a threat and – rather than being pro-active in assisting me – have gone out of their way to stymie my efforts in whatever arena we’re both engaged.  Not that I care all that much – life can be tough, and I try not to be a whiner about it.  Again, it’s nice to hear that there are other people in the world who will go out of their way to help another human being without having a purely selfish motive behind the assistance.

The teacher further identifies with Andre’s state of mind at the time – he was “feeling deserted” and his feelings had been “murdered”, which is obviously a lot worse than them being hurt.  From the perspective of the student, the teacher is infallible and didn’t have tough times or struggle to get to the superior position of “teacher”.  In this case, the teacher is revealing his or her own humanity to Andre as a way of helping Andre through his difficult time. 

My read on the line “plaid clash with polka dots I hope you ain’t mad” is that the teacher is turning Andre’s attention back to Andre and reminding him that his own choices in some way led him to being hurt.  That is, if we take this to the schoolyard, the teacher is saying to Andre “Look at yourself, son:  you’re wearing plaid and polka dots.  They clash.  It’s cool if you want to wear that, but you can’t expect to do so without attracting a little bit of negative attention from your peers.  Either wear some duds that don’t “clash”, or be man enough to have confidence in yourself and endure the ridicule of others.”

To repeat, the thing I dig about these lines is that it demonstrates that there are people in the world who will go out of their way to help another person, with no thought for their own gain.  And these altruistic actions have a positive impact on the recipient.  This event must have had a pretty big impact on Andre for him to write and rap about it.  And if you’ve ever seen what Andre wears and the confidence he displays, you know what I’m talking about.  Without being too circular, it’s good for me to hear Andre revealing his own humanity to me through his lyrics.

If you have the album Led Zeppelin II, I recommend you flip over the record and point the needle to the third set of grooves – track 7 on the CD:  Ramble On is the title of this post and the theme for today in my life.  Here’s a live version from I-don’t-know-when-or-where.  For maximum effect of this post, please listen and read along with the lyrics.

How and why Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” is a proper metaphor for my life today:

Leaves are fallin’ all around, time I was on my way
Thanks to you, I’m much obliged for such a pleasant stay
but now it’s time for me to go, the autumn moon lights my way
for now I smell the rain, and with it, pain
and it’s headed my way
Aw, sometimes I grow so tired
but I know I’ve got one thing I got to do

Spring is coming, I can smell it in the air.  Days are getting longer; the sun rises earlier and it’s easier for me to get up in the morning feeling energetic.  The past few seasons have been good to me, but things are changing in my life.  I can smell the pain headed my way if I try to hold on to what’s past.  Hard decisions have to be made; the time for them has been approaching for a while.  It’s time to strap my gear on and head on down this metaphorical road.  As Plant says “I know one thing I got to do:”

A-ramble on, and now’s the time, the time is now
Sing my song, I’m goin’ ’round the world, I gotta find my girl
On my way, I’ve been this way ten years to the day
Ramble on, gotta find the queen of all my dreams

Today, I’ll be hiking alone.  Scott and I haven’t gone hiking for the past three Saturdays – we’ve hardly missed a Saturday in the past few seasons.  Never three in a row.  We have nine mountains left to climb in our goal of joining the Catskill 3500 Club.  Most of them are trail-less peaks, which means they’ll be tough hikes.  Today I climb Rusk Mountain – the easiest (in my estimation) of the bushwacks.  I’d try something harder, but I’ve never walked into the woods with just a map and a compass by myself before.

Got no time to for spreadin’ roots, the time has come to be gone
And though our health we drank a thousand times
it’s time to ramble on

I’ve spent the last few weeks waiting on other people:  waiting for Scott to be available on the weekend to hike, waiting for a certain girl to (metaphorically) look in my direction, waiting for my boss to spontaneously give me a raise.  As though I were actually walking through this life with other people.  I’ve had a good few seasons of companionship – made some friendships, solidified others.  Sure, I’ve been lonely here and there, but somewhere along the line I forgot I was alone.  Or maybe I should say and somewhere along the line I forgot I am alone.  I’ve been holding back waiting for others to catch up – gathering moss, if you will.

A-ramble on, and now’s the time, the time is now
Sing my song, I’m goin’ ’round the world
I’ve gotta find my girl
On my way, I’ve been this way ten years to the day
I gotta ramble on, I gotta find the queen of all my dreams
I tell you no lie

So my gear is in the car behind me, full tank of gas, and I’m off.  Literally and figuratively.  I’m hereby putting myself on notice that if anybody wants to roll with me, they’d better hustle up and roll with me, ’cause I’m not stopping to wait.  I need to be “The Big O“, not just think about it.  Companionship is nice while it’s there, but it fades and wears and loneliness shows through.  And loneliness isn’t something I can abide for long – what I can do, though is embrace my alone-ness and get back to taking care of me.

Mine’s a tale that can’t be told, my freedom I hold dear
How years ago in days of old when magic filled the air
’twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, mm-I met a girl so fair
but Gollum and the evil warg crept up and slipped away with her
her, her, yeah, and ain’t nothin’ I can do, no

So today I have no hiking partner, no girl, and no raise.  I just have my map & compass, my gear, and myself to keep me company.  I’m the only one that can make me happy.  But please, dear reader, don’t misunderstand:  I’m not unhappy.  I don’t feel deserted.  This isn’t me whining.  This is me girding my loins and polishing my armour.

I guess I’ll keep on ramblin’, I’m gonna
Sing my song/Sh-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, I’ve gotta find my baby
I’m gonna ramble on, sing my song
Gonna work my way all around the world
Baby, baby/Ramble on, yeah

Scott’s probably reading this now.  We’re not breaking up, buddy.  You’re still my hiking partner – if you want to be.  I’m just off to climb Rusk by myself today.  In hiking, as in life, I’ll be right there with you when you’re ready to climb it; I have no problem climbing this mountain twice.  Dear reader, I hope you’re listening to the music.  This isn’t a sad song, this is a song of rebirth and renewal.  It’s about getting a move-on to see what’s around the next bend, over the next rise.  New and exciting adventures lie ahead and I plan to drink of them as from the cup that overfloweth.  I’m skipping my way up these mountains, whistlin’ a happy tune. 

A-do-do-n-do-n-do-n-do, my baby/Baby
A-ramble on, baby
A-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-de-do-de-do-de-do-de-do-de, yeah, yeah/
I can’t stop this feelin’ in my heart
Everytime I feel I will leave, I really gotta part
Gotta keep searchin’ for my baby/
Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, babe
I’ve gotta keep a-searchin’for my baby
My, my, my, my, my, my, my baby/
Yeah-yeah, a-yeah-yeah, a-yeah-yeah
My, my, my, my, my, my baby/
Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah
Ooh, my, my, my-my, my-my, my-my, yeah/
I can’t find my bluebird, I’d listen to my bluebird sing
but I, I can’t find my bluebird
I keep a-ramblin’ baby/ Ah, ah, yeah
I keep a-ramblin’, baby/I keep, keep, keep, keep, keep
Babe, babe, babe, babe/
I keep a-ramblin’, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby
My, my babe
Bay-ya-by/A-goodbye, goodbye, a-goodbye, baby
Well, something’s wrong

Oh, and if that lovely girl of whom I speak is reading this,

;-) 

I may not be waiting around gathering moss, but you know how to get ahold of me.

So again, I’m off.  Catch on up and roll with me if you like – I plan on having fun.

Today’s Hike:  Rusk Mountain

 
View Larger Map

All the aforesaid aside, I don’t plan on dying today.  This ain’t no suicide note.  Rusk is a bushwack of the releatively-easy type:  straight up and straight down.  I shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping the summit in sight, as there still aren’t any leaves on the trees.  Rusk is also 3,680′ high, the twenty-first highest of the thirty-five mountains in the Catskills over 3,500′, so it won’t take me forever (part of the way up is on a trail, anyway).  I’ll be sans-GPS tracker, so I apologize, dear reader, that you won’t be able to follow my progress.  But then again, this ain’t about you. 

Current Meditation:

Every so often, I’ll hear someone say “life is a journey, not a series of destinations”.  And every time I do, I close my eyes and meditate on this for a bit. 

I have goals – things I want to accomplish.  Some are long-term, some are short-term.  Pay off my student loan debt, wax the car, a meaningful relationship with a smokin’-hot member of the opposite sex – things like that.  My problem is that I all-too-often blur the line between long- and short-term goals.  Everything becomes a short-term goal and I end up wondering why I haven’t accomplished anything.

My long-term goals are long-term for a reason:  they can’t be accomplished in the short term.  Sometimes they’re built brick-by-brick of short-term goals, and sometimes they’re accomplished by a series of decisions along the way.

When I meditate on the fact that life is a journey, all those pressing issues that are unresolved and burdensome just melt away.  Tomorrow is another day.  All those things on my to-do list suddenly become relatively insignificant and I can let go and just be.  Besides “unresolved” and “burdensome” are the direct result of me setting expectations for myself.  Reasonable expectations are ok – the handful of things on today’s to-do list – but getting rich and married before the week is out are not (reasonable or ok as expectations).

When I keep my head down and get done the things I need to do today, I move closer to accomplishing those long-term goals.  And in the same way that it’s ok if I don’t get one or two of the things on today’s to-do list done (e.g. the dishes), the same is true of my long-term goals:  some of them just won’t get accomplished, either.

And that’s ok, too – when I remember that life is the journey:  I don’t recognize destinations except in hindsight anyway.

Ode to the Open Road

by Ted

The Road
unfolds
unfurls
uncurls
before me.

My eyes look farther
to the horizon.

Myopia is stretched.
Possibilities.
A longer view.

Switch gears and
accelerate past the
car formerly in front of me
and driving becomes
a metaphor for life.

Maybe I should just stick with prose.  My point here is that I didn’t realize that I needed some good highway time until I was actually there.  This happened yesterday.  This past weekend was the third one in a row that Scott and I didn’t go hiking.  I knew I needed some kind of physical release and the Moving Energy class on Friday night took care of some of that.  What I didn’t realize was that I had also become accustomed to the 2.5 hour drive to and from the Catskills.  I needed to get away from the hometown streets with their attendant stop signs and streetlights and really let go for a bit.  Well worth it, even if my trip to Woodbury Common didn’t bring me back with any new oxford shirts.

There’s No Fourth Thing

Or is there?  The title of this post is “A Poem, Among Other Things” – which means that in order to be a true-to-form title, I need at least four things to qualify for use of the word “among”.  I should have just gone with “between”.  Oh, well, only someone as knit-picky as me would pick that up, anyway.

How about a couple of hiking metaphors today?

I’m going to semi-steal a bit from my friend Alessandra’s blog  – she posted Robert Frost‘s “The Road Not Taken” a few days ago.  I haven’t read this poem in quite a while (probably since high school), but there’s still something about it that resonates with me. 

Whether I still, like so many of us, think of myself as “different” or whether I’m just plain defiant, I couldn’t really say.  But there’s something about going exactly where everyone else seems not to be going that appeals to me.  I never really had an interest in getting to know the popular kids - I usually gravitated (and still do) to the one sitting by themself, intent on whatever they’re doing – whether reading, writing, fiddling with the holes in their pants, or just looking out the window.  I was always interested in learning the things that others didn’t already know about.

Go ahead and shrink my head and say it’s because I have an overbearing father or because I’m the eldest in my family – it makes no difference to me.  It’s just the way I am.  I’ve spent enough time trying to get to the bottom of it and mind-effing myself along the way, that I think I’m happier not knowing and just being.

And so, without further digression, here is Frost’s poem:

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It’s really the last sentence (5 lines) that gets me.  Along the way, I’ve constantly made choices for which I’ve been poo-pooed because they didn’t conform to what the crowd was doing – what was expected of me.  And ”with a sigh” I can’t imagine myself making any other choices.  I’m happy with where I am right now.

I switched from a Biology major to a Philosophy major in undergrad because I was more interested in the latter than the former.  I can tell you right now that I’m glad I don’t spend my days micropipetting solutions into agar blocks for gel electrophoresis.  Interesting though it may be.

That Philosophy degree led me to law school, where I was further educated in the arts of logic, argument, analogy, and metaphor.  Yet again I chose not to flow with the crowd into Pmbr or Bar/Bri classes and thence to huge bar exam testing sites.  I am not an attorney today, for which I receive no end of grief from everyone I meet.  But I’m happy today.

“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.  There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right.  To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage,” says Emerson.  Have I mapped out a course of action for my life?  Probably not.  Do I do so in the short-term?  Absolutely.  Do I follow them to their end?  Again, yes.

Have these things led me to riches, fame, and power?  Not yet – at least not in the senses that these terms are traditionally understood.  By metaphor or analogy then?  Maybe.  At the end of the day, I don’t suppose it matters “Ashes and dust, Maximus, ashes and dust” as Proximo was wont to say.

So are we all just taking different trails up the same mountain?

And I’ll leave you with this, dear reader - again from Emerson:  “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

***All metaphors and analogies aside, this post is in no way meant to suggest that my road is “better” than yours or that you “follow me” – I prefer to enjoy these woods by myself.***