Laziness

I wrote an article about laziness the other day. It seems to be a theme which keeps coming up: why people don't do what they know is important for them.

I've done this two ways:
thinking about our "free will" vs. our "free won't"
and
laziness

What struck me today is "What can be a cure for laziness?" ... certainly, it's not possible to always say to ourselves, "Don't be lazy!" and that's all it takes to stop it once and for all. The gap is wider than that.

Here's what I started on. It's in a sidebar in my Laziness article, but I'm still chewing on this... it came to me while I was trying to avoid doing my morning dishes. I was about to pass them by ("I won't do them now... I hate doing dishes... I'll just leave them for later...") when I realized that I wouldn't want to do them later, either. So I said to myself, "What would it feel like to do the dishes now?"

Then this part of the article came:

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Experiment for Laziness:

Here's something to try, which is easy... when you have a task or activity to do and you feel that "laziness" coming on (you know what that feels like: "I don't want to do it!!"), try doing it anyway. Mindfully --that means, with all thought-- do the activity, and think about it. I'm not suggesting that you love it; you aren't supposed to love everything!

Just think about doing that task: think about the fact that you are doing it anyway, despite every cell in your body wants to go somewhere else or be doing something else, maybe even relaxing! Try not to just grumble negatively about how you hate it; just think about the task and your previous thoughts about not doing it.

Quite possibly, your mind will start calming down. You may start feeling like the task isn't too bad --- or you may be proud of yourself for accomplishing it when you would normally put off the task!

Here's the best part... you might even discover that what you've been doing was DREADING the task - when the activity itself wasn't all that bad! That's a case of perception versus reality : we often perceive something to be worse than it really is. Worse yet, the "dreading" may take more time and negative thoughts than the activity itself.

That's "mindfulness": attention on what you are doing, and what you need to do, instead of the perception of it.

Contrasts give us gratitude and appreciation

Today I brought my car into the shop...

I accidentally went to the wrong dealership (same "automotive group" name, wrong auto manufacturer). The one where I first arrived was crowded with cars in the lanes, so my car was boxed-in and I was very confused. When I finally found my way into the service area, it was complete chaos; no one was helping customers, and, after a while, someone finally stabbed the question at me, "Yeah? What do you want?" It was a war zone. It felt like survival in the trenches.

I felt anxious on the outside, continually meditating on the inside, trying to keep my peace.

When I discovered that yes, I was at the wrong dealership (WHEW!), I made my way into the correct one. Honda. Wow, was a wonderful place: quiet location, accomodating, attentive, quick, hospitable (gave me a free rental car for the day!). It was like a cool drink on a hot day to work with them! It was like entering a veritable resort: they (unlike the other dealership?) realized that service and care was actually what that building was there for.

Gratitude washed over me. Appreciation. Joy at discovering this "haven" of service - and not simply for the wealthy, but for all. This dealership -- this business -- realized that happy (non-complaining) customers come from hospitable service!

Even bigger lesson: how much that "hospitality" and customer care --- HUMAN care --- is important. Even the smallest things, perhaps even saying hello, made a difference. Their service wasn't plastic or phony. . . something to remember in all my ventures.

The Internet ...

People who want to see the Internet as sending civilization "to hell in a handbasket" aren't seeing the full capacity of what a global community could be. I'm not saying anything new here, but I'm simply living proof.

Sure, the Internet is fueled by two things: capitalism (most website are just digital 'brochures' for selling something) and sex (thus proving the 'selling something' aspect). Most people do want more money and more pleasure.

However, when I realize that I am truly conversing with someone across the planet in real-time , simply blows my mind. Please don't let yourselves take that for granted... imagine all those pioneers who waited patiently for weeks while the Pony Express brought letters. Or before that, ships carried letters for months - and only if you had enough money and a fancy wax seal to guard against brigands opening your missive.

I remember when I first saw the World Wide Web. It was the "new" incarnation of graphic interfaces, an old browser called Mosaic. (1993?) This was before Netscape or Internet Explorer. I was explained what the WWW was... and it took me a long time to understand what "hypertext" was... and what "linking" was... imagine, trying for the first time to understand that I could be travelling from place to place in the blink of an eye!

I was so excited that I taught myself how to code web pages from scratch. I taught myself how to write HTML. I was the cutting edge... this was long ago when domain names were expensive. I had a website. I was there: part of something which "links" in that Web.

In my own lifetime (I'm 41), I've seen:

• TV come into its own.
• Home computers arose where there was once only mainframes.
• These home computers went from a few people with text-only screens, to almost everyone having one - and in all sizes, weights, colors, and speed.
• Record albums phased out, and CDs became "it".
• I saw VHS tapes come in (we were the first on our block), and now we have DVDs with interactivity.
• When I was young, no one had answering machine... and now, everyone has cell phones which fit in the palm of their hand. My PDA palm is a mini computer, too.

Meet your neighbors. They are right over there... only 5,000 miles away :) . Your grandmother couldn't do that at your age, so why don't you?

The Myth of Fingerprints...

The myth of fingerprints*... the idea that we are all completely unique (like fingerprints). I have been finding that there is more binding us to human similarity than utter differences.

I've started watching this wonderful PBS series on DVD: "The Power of Myth" with Bill Moyer interviewing Joseph Campbell, one of the most wise and spiritual writers (and dreamers) who has lived in the 20th century. I sat in rapt fascination and understanding of how my burgeoning awareness of things "bigger than I am" is actually a story told by generations for thousands of years - and across the planet. The original Star Wars is an example of the supreme power of myth.

The apologeticists (people who use logic to "prove" the Bible) dislike Campbell (see one commentary here) but Campbell is one man offering one set of thoughts... and designed to invite people to decide for themselves.

Already blogged by someone else, here is a demo of what Joseph Campbell was discussing. This is only an example of Campbell's work: that all the world, throughout time, have the same thoughts, directions and dreams. (The highlights in green are my emphasis.)

NOTE: some of these quotes are taken OUT(!) OF SENTENCES from what Mr. Campbell had said. (I repeat that these were transcribed by someone else...) ... yet, given that I have no other transcription method I'll offer this fake transcription. This is as good as I'm going to get - this DVD is worth a rent! "The Power of Myth" is vast and expansive. Joseph Campbell has an extreme respect for the human spirit and human growth, but he is not held by any dogma. he respects the Christian as much as the Buddhist and the Hindu... and, especially of all, he respects the human experience to learn and grow.

Excerpts from "Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers"

MOYERS: But aren’t many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?

CAMPBELL: Yes, they are.

MOYERS: How do you explain that?

CAMPBELL: They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.

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CAMPBELL: The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.

For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy, Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility, But if you read "Jesus ascended to heaven" in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward – not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.

MOYERS: Aren’t you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith – that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?

CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.

MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.

CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."

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MOYERS: In classic Christian doctrine the material world is to be despised, and life is to be redeemed in the hereafter, in heaven, where our rewards come. But you say that if you affirm that which you deplore, you are affirming the very world which is our eternity at the moment.

CAMPBELL: Yes, that is what I’m saying, Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The problem with heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you won’t even think of eternity. You’ll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.

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CAMPBELL: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be, This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

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MOYERS: So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled to try to describe it?

CAMPBELL: That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.

MOYERS: And yet we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you believe that?

CAMPBELL: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it,’ My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam, And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

MOYERS: I like the idea that it is not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.

CAMPBELL: Yes. As Karlfried Graf Durckheim says, "When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey."

The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. Pollen is the life source, The pollen path is the path to the center. The Navaho say, "Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path,"

* The Myth of Fingerprints
by Paul Simon
(on the Graceland album)
... It was the myth of fingerprints
I've seen them all and man
They're all the same

Heat

This weekend was the first warm weekend of the summer. Washington, DC normally has sticky, humid summers which begin almost clockwork on Memorial Day weekend: a fine "howdy-do" of surprise misery without so much as a slow spiral into the summery temperatures. This year, Memorial Day weekend was glorious in weather, but the following weekend, this past weekend, was an adventure in hazy sunshine... and sweat.

But... before you say, "This is a modern culture with modern amenities like air-conditioning", what I'm speaking about is the sweat inside my house. My house, not even 5 years old, was 85-degrees over the weekend, with air-conditioning on full-blast and confused cats looking at me in overheated concern.

I was even offered some fine advice: "old houses are built better and they are like iceboxes when conditioned well..." didn't help much. I panted like a poodle. My hair curled in the misty humidity. I thought about how much money I throw at the electric company for the effort of the air... which wasn't conditioning me.

Here's my point: I used to live outside, around the country, in a van and then a little trailer. I performed on the Renaissance Festival circuit, when living quarters were anything which shaded from sun and protected from rain. Usually, that was the full deal: very little modernity, definately no frosty air to cool the day or night.

And now, far removed from my many years on the road, I sweat under an electric fan and I whine about it.

I now choose to be grateful for having a place (at all!) for my stuff and indoor plumbing... and even a phone to call the air-conditioning repairman. What's a few beads of sweat in exchange for the reminder of how glorious my life is?

Desire as disappointment

This weekend I was assisting at a convention in Philadelphia as a volunteer; I was investigating this convention possibly to be a vendor one day. Being a volunteer gave me an 'inside track' to the attendees as well as to the management.

This convention is hobby-driven; the attendees come from other states to pursue their hobbies, make purchases, hear speakers, and even obtain autographs from people within the industry. Thus, there is a vibrancy to the air: the interest and the desire comes from deep within each attendee.

One job I was given was to watch over a line of people waiting to speak to a famous industry professional. My job was to stand at the end of the line with a sign that stated the end of the line: the professional had only a finite amount of time with the line. It was my job to politely end the line.

What I noticed was that many people tried to cajole me to allow them to join the line. This was very understandable: they missed the window of time to enjoin the line. What I surprised me was the reactions to the end of the line. Grown adults were actually pouting, pushing out a quivering lip of disappointment. They looked at me with forced sad eyes, and even tried to convince me that their entire weekend would have been a waste if they didn't look this one man in the face for 25 seconds and an autograph.

My head was a whirl of thoughts: not only did the convention offer 3 full days of programming, activities, quality vendors, other professionals for lectures and signings, and comeraderie, but these folks were actually allowing their disappointment to color their weekend. Over and over they would return to me to stand and sulk, a "boo-boo-face" curling their lip. I can only assume that they believed that their sulking was going to influence me to let them into line. (Little did they consider that I could not let every person who sulked into line).

Their desire for this one signature was overtaking their ability to enjoy the rest of the weekend; so much so that they were convincing themselves that the weekend was a complete bust if they didn't do this one signature event.

We all create value to events, activities, objects, and people in our lives. This is a human fact. We create our own value systems, and each person's value doesn't always match another's. Values are good. Values are internal barometers of who we are and what is important to us.

However, "value" is taken to a new degree when desire is added: the desire which says, "If I don't get this thing that I am desiring, my life is somehow limited, reduced, or devalued." This is seen in many ways: people who sulk about their wardrobe if it doesn't have designer labels, people who are depressed because they want a fancy car and they only have a 'regular' car, people who can't get their spouses to do what they want them to do. This means that we get so very attached to the idea of the object.

It is fine to appreciate something, someone or an activity: it means that we find it valuable. We may even try to move closer to it, investigating if it works well in our lives. What hurts is when we decide that our desire for it overrides our peace: we are miserable if we don't get that thing. Our lives somehow go down the drain because we are unfulfilled from our desire.

The Buddhists discuss that it is attachment to something we desire which causes our suffering. It is not our value of that object, event or person which causes the suffering; it is that we feel that without those things, our lives are belittled, wincing, limping in its absence. Their philosophy is simple: stop being attached. This doesn't mean we de-value things (or people) in our lives; it's that we see the value and stop thinking our lives are belittled without it. We can appreciate a relationship, a situation, or a thing, but we shouldn't stake our happiness on obtaining it - and being disappointed if it doesn't come to us.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has a similar manner of considering this: they say to pray about the circumstance and then let God decide whether you should receive it; release your desire to the Divine. The faithful continues to pray, but scripture says that God decides what's good for the pray-er anyway. In this case as well, the "active" desire still doesn't help. Scripture says, essentially, to release the attachment... the pray-er's responsibility was upheld to communicate to the Divine, and that was accomplished; the obtaining of the desired situation is considered secondary to the process of considering, appreciating, and then praying/communication.

The reality is, that we don't always get what we desire.

Back to the "boo-boo faces": perhaps they will learn balance in their desires. If the loss of one 25-second meeting with a busy professional can ruin their weekend (or week), what could a vast illness do to devestate them? Or a house fire? Or a traffic accident? If they don't learn to mitigate their desires, how would they learn to deal with real problems in more difficult circumstances?

A line floats into my head from a favorite movie, The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment." The words describe how we need to learn to deal with the less-optimum circumstances in our lives. If we deal with the less-optimum situations of our lives, might we also have gratitude for what we do have, what we do encounter, and what is within our grasp without "hoping"? I'm not saying we should be without hope; I'm just suggesting not to be attached to what we wish for, in case we don't get it.

Having perspective on ourselves, our lives, our belongings, our relationships, is how we grow and become peaceful.