Archive for mindfulness
New Year’s Resolution
From the wonderful Bryan A. Garner:
The Spectator recently ran a sharp piece titled “The Post-Literate Society.” Its thesis? We’re turning away from books. Attention spans are shrinking. Thought itself is drifting back toward the oral, not the written. Katherine Dee, the author, even writes of “the collapse of writing.”
That collapse may already be here.
You can moan about it. Or mock it. Or howl at the moon.
But in law, words still rule. Ours is a literary craft, and the written word isn’t retreating from the courtroom or the contract anytime soon. That means you have an opening—an invitation—to stand apart.
How? Read. Every day. Offscreen. (Most people already surrender six to nine hours a day to glowing rectangles.) Read slowly. Study the craft. Absorb technique. You’ll sharpen your own.
As for a New Year’s resolution—why not start there? Make one that lasts.
Still the goal
“Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.” – La Rochefoucauld
Canadian Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is my favourite holiday, one whose name I obey, happily, twice each year.
Still so lucky
“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.”
No one rounds out a sentence like Henry James.
The end in the beginning
A girlfriend once told me that I wrapped presents so poorly that no gift inside could overcome the offence I’d given by the mayhem of paper and tape on the outside. That was almost forty years ago. The sight of wrapping paper to this day makes me want to smoke crack.
A few Christmas seasons ago, I was in Buffalo with my partner staying with her family. The night before Christmas she took all of the gifts she’d sent to Buffalo in advance out of the boxes, so that she could wrap them here in our small bedroom. The room seemed an unshakeable chaos. There were sixty-two presents. I started to cry on the inside.
My beloved was in her element and conducted before me a symphony of wrapping. She saw no chaos. She saw the end in the beginning, perfectly appointed presents with delightful cards, never disorder, no antagonism between love and skill. Sixty-two marvellous gifts, given in love (successfully).
Genius sees no complexity. It sees the end in the beginning. We don’t. I don’t. We see a mess.
Related
Back in 2016 a woman in my Dialectical Behavioural Therapy class told us she was “practicing not having Costco-size emotional reactions to 7-11-sized situations.” It became my motto.
Suddenness
Yesterday in New West I had lunch with friends and got a doggy bag with half a roast beef sandwich and a bunch of fries. Walking toward the Skytrain station I saw a couple of bedraggled guys and asked them if they wanted it. They said no, and then one of them pointed to an older, intoxicated fellow a few yards away and said “he might.” That third fellow said he did and reached out for the food. Then one of the original pair jumped over and yanked the bag from my hand: “Nothing for him!”
The third fellow wailed: “You took it from me!” That angry complaint was aimed *at me*, I realized with some fear. He started after me as I hustled up the stairs to the train. The stairs must have deterred him.
I’ll feel safe when I get on the train, I told myself. But I didn’t feel safe … for the rest of the day, unable to return to the quotidian habit of forgetting the suddenness that surrounds us.
Simpleness
My recipe for making people happy:
- Tell parents that their infant is beautiful.
- Tell neighbours that their dog is beautiful.
- Tell children that their bikes are fantastic.
Facebook friends append some ingredients to my recipe:
- “Little kids also like to know that you love their sneakers.” (thanks to S.M.)
- “Also, tell them their lemonade is good. Buy a second cup.” (thanks to @bfwriter)
My favourite ‘mindfulness’ activity …
… Counting the container ships in English Bay while walking along the seawall. They hide behind other ships, emerge, recede into a faraway haze, disappear behind Stanley Park or UBC. In one walk there were eight at the start, by the Cactus Club, then thirteen right before I got to the pool on Second Beach. The counting discipline makes me feel strangely great, as my patient friends will attest.
Thanks to John Glionna for the photo.
You Are Here
I’ve been here many hundreds of times, across the water from Vancouver’s Science World, yet apparently I have never been fully here, as in ‘YOU ARE HERE’. How did I miss this great sign?!
My teacher and friend Robert Creeley titled at least eight of his poems “Here.” It was the title of one of his very last published poems:
Up a hill and down again.
Around and in –
Out was what it was all about
but now it’s done.
At the end was the beginning,
just like it said or someone did.
Keep looking, keep looking,
keep looking.
–
And here is one from “Hello,” a book from Creeley’s mid-career:
Since I can’t
kill anyone
I’d better
sit still.
.
The opposite of talking
A friend called me a good listener the other day. I was happy to get this compliment; I work hard at listening. Not being clueless is a full-time activity for me.
I was reminded of the Fran Lebowitz quote: “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”
Self-driving cars
Almost nothing is more personal, in the modern world, than the choices one makes while driving. People hardly recognize how often they improvise behind the wheel, how tickled they are by banners at Target, or by memories fortified driving toward some surprising point.
Looking
One of my side projects is a mindfulness exercise I call Looking Straight Up, a teeny online photo-gallery. I always have a couple of cameras on me when I am out and about, more to make sure I am paying attention than to take photographs. I have found that staring straight up (and trying not to fall over) is a good way to start conversations with strangers, too.
This afternoon on my way home I was startled by this old birch, how on one side all of its branches had been shorn off, which made it seem very *haute couture*. A woman asked me, “Is there something special about this tree?” We talked for about ten minutes and then concluded, in unison, yes.
… knock on wood …
You can’t tempt fate, not really, but you can tempt order (or disorder) (or evil).
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