After ‘The Story You Could Be Watching’ post I got to thinking a lot more about the different ways people seek to distract themselves from the time and place that they’re in. For many people it goes far beyond watching movies or tv on a little device, it’s something that extends into their entire life.

It makes me think of a talk on mindfulness given by Jon Kabat-Zinn where he was pointing to the fact that the only moment we ever really have to live in is now. And if you’re always off somewhere else eventually you could end up spending most of your life on autopilot and never actually living it.

To illustrate his point in a more personal way he challenged the audience to do a bit of ‘homework’. I thought the homework was pretty funny yet powerful in it’s own way:

The next time you’re in the shower check and see if you’re in the shower okay? (audience bursts into laughter) You may not be there, you may be in a meeting.

Or… the whole meeting may be in the shower with you and you may be having having one hell of an argument with people who are not there.

…But you know this moment is your life, it’s not like well we’re living for some other moment. If you sum that kind of mindlessness over time it could be ninety percent of your waking life, though I use the word “waking” advisedly and in parenthesis.

It’s so true! And I see people autopiloting through much more interesting situations than showers all the time. It happens to everybody sometimes but watch out, enough of it and big chunks of your life could pass by without you.

So next time you’re in the shower do a check and ask yourself, are you really there or somewhere else talking to imaginary people?

(photo by aconant)

“Do not wait, the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”
- George Herbert

I like the idea of ‘start where you stand’. Seems like sometimes there’s a million excuses not to start something, even if you want to do it more than anything else in the world.

Or in a lot of cases it’s exactly because you want to accomplish something so much that you don’t start. What if the one thing you’ve been dreaming about doing for so long goes all wrong, then what?

This makes me think of something posted by Merlin Mann on the Facebook page for 43 Folders (a site he runs that helps people learn how to accomplish more of the things they want to do in life). There’s only one post on the Facebook page and it says:

Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

I laughed so hard when I saw that because it’s so true and such a perfect thing to put on a Facebook page geared towards helping people accomplish things.

For most people I think the barrier is their own fear. They’ve been living in the shadow of fear for so long that it’s comfortable in a way and even seems preferable to setting out on the path of accomplishing their dreams.

But the simple fact is that if you don’t start where you stand then you’ll never get anywhere.

“I am like a sick man weary of society. There was a time I wanted an official post, land of my own, another time I would have liked to live in a monastery. Yet I wandered on, a cloud in the wind, wanting only to capture the beauty of the flowers and birds.”
- Matsuo Basho

Living in Alaska it’s easy to understand the feeling that Matsuo Basho wrote about in that quote. I love living in the city and being in the thick of things, but when summer starts to come round it’s hard not to want to go out and wander such an immensely beautiful landscape.

You could spend an entire lifetime out there just taking everything in and who knows, there might be some Bashos out there right now doing just that :).

(pic by wintersixfour)

“The path you are afraid to choose holds the key to your happiness.”
- Baya Tuvshintugs

I like this quote a lot, it’s very thought provoking. Not only does it make me think about the general meaning and wisdom of the quote but it also takes my mind to all the paths that I’m afraid to take but may need to.

“After My Son David Died, Then I Met His Daughter” The title of the article reminded me of something that could be on Six Word Stories or a PostSecret card. As soon as I saw the title I knew I had to read the story, it was just too compelling not to.

As I clicked over I wondered what I’d find, would it be a true story or fiction and would it be as compelling as the title?

As I read it I found out that yes it is a true story. It’s an honest, heartfelt account of a relationship with a son whose life was often turbulent and tragic.

The twist to the story of him and his parents came after he died, when the daughter who never knew him was bored in class one day and decided to search random things on the internet to pass the time.

I definitely recommend this article. Not only is it deeply moving but it tells a story that will become more and more common as the internet becomes ingrained in our lives and connects us all, even after death…

After My Son David Died, Then I Met His Daughter

April is National Poetry Month so I thought I’d share one of my favorite poetry-related things, it’s an animation of the poem Forgetfulness by Billy Collins.

I love this video and I think the animator(s) did an excellent job of visualizing the poem in a way that complements it rather than just lays pictures over the top of the words.

The flickering and non-centralized style of the animation really brings home the feeling of searching and nostalgia for all those lost memories. While watching it I can’t help but to wonder what moments and days of my life have gone out of memory as quick as the snapping of fingers or which ones might be silently fading into the background.

Like last night as I was lying in bed in that stage where you can still think but you slip in and out of some kind of light dreaming I was thinking of a day in Fairbanks when a friend and I were out walking in the sun smoking cigars to celebrate the birth of his first child, a daughter.

As I was retracing that walk it just seemed so distant and hazy, eventually I thought did this really happen or is my sleepy mind drifting and making up this story? It was weird, I felt like it was real but I lay there not quite 100% sure about it.

Today now that I’m fully awake I know that yes it did really happen, but even now that memory seems hazy and dreamlike. I have a feeling the memory of that walk is trying it’s best to sneak out of my consciousness, but why? Forgetfulness is a mysterious thing.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Found this short story at Six Word Stories and liked it a lot:

A thousand wrinkles, a thousand stories.

Many people consider wrinkles to be a bad thing but personally I think they’re nice and give people character, often making them look more wise.

Of course this might change when I start to get wrinkles lol, I don’t know. But I like the idea of each wrinkle signifying some important story in somebody’s life and I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

What stories do wrinkles tell? Sometimes I think they can reveal sad things about somebody’s life. I once had a teacher who was fairly young but even by that age she had many severe looking wrinkles around her mouth like she had spent most of her life holding her words in. I always wondered if those wrinkles were there because in her personal life she had to censor herself a lot.

Other times they can tell happy stories about a person’s life. Like I see a lot of people with ‘laugh wrinkles’, obviously these people have smiled and laughed a lot in their lives. I hope those are the kind of wrinkles I get when I’m older :).

The movie How To Cook Your Life is about Edward Espe Brown, a man who studied under the legendary Zen master DT Suzuki and who’s spent most of his life living in and cooking for a Zen monastery.

It’s also about a philosophy of food that most people aren’t entirely familiar with and might seem a little strange at first:

‘Treat food as if it’s as important as your eyesight.’

Often what we eat is manufactured as fast as possible in places unknown to us, frozen, transported, warmed up, and then moved from plate to mouth while our minds are off going through the motions of what needs to get done at work the next day. Not much thought is given to the food if at all.

This movie sets out to inspire people to resist what’s become standard practice and instead view food as being something worth spending time with and paying attention to.

KITCHEN HEARTACHES

I was initially drawn to How To Cook Your life because I’m really into Buddhist philosphy and am usually pretty interested in any movie about it that seems genuine.

But as I got further into the movie the food philosophy aspect of it really started to resonate with me because of a major problem I was having at the time. I was struggling with something that people do every day, a simple thing, but it was causing me a lot of heartache: cooking.

I was awkward and frustrated in the kitchen, often not being able to get through making dinner without some sort of minor meltdown. All this was due to experiences in my childhood coming back to haunt me, food (or actually the withholding of it) was used back then as a way to induce suffering and the kitchen was now a lightning rod for all those old feelings of hunger.

This translated into a lot of thinking about the past and less of me being consciously in the present. Problem was, the present was where all the cooking was supposed to be happening lol.

As I watched the movie I really wanted to be as mindful with food and cooking as the people in it were learning to be.


DUALITY

Edward Espe Brown is an interesting guy and one of the main reasons for that is an intense duality he seems to have.

In some scenes he appeared to be the kind of person that was naturally prone to be incurably frustrated by life’s situations. While teaching cooking classes he was sometimes snappy with his students and often seemed openly aggravated by the presence of the cameras lingering at the edge of the room. And when a jar wouldn’t open he fought to remain calm about it …and lost. Not exactly Zen-like or always paying attention to the food.

But in other scenes he had the true serenity of someone who’s been practicing Zen Buddhism for decades. He delivered words of wisdom to the crowd gathered around him in the temple like it was something that was as natural as breathing. And of course the movie is based around his talent for teaching people how to treat food as if it were as important as their eyesight.

Which one is more of his true self? I’d say both of them, and his duality singlehandedly creates all the drama in the film. Anyway it’s reassuring to know that even Zen priests get pissed off sometimes when a jar won’t open.


YOUR LIFE

My conclusion about this movie is that it isn’t for everybody. Many parts of it were snoozeworthy and one part that appears to celebrate a lady making political excuses for stealing fruit just made me mad. But if you can look past the (numerous) downsides there’s a lot of good things to be found here, new perspectives on life and food opened up through interesting stories.

This movie shows that the Zen philosphy of mindfulness and the food you eat are just different aspects of the same thing: your life. The awareness and sacredness that you bring to each moment of that life is the important part.

This includes cooking. Nowadays when I get frustrated in the kitchen I try not to be so mired in the past but instead to take it as an opportunity to practice being in the moment, to focus on the food and why I’m making it. I have this movie partially to thank for that.

(You can see this on Netflix Instant Streaming or get the DVD from Amazon.)