Category: Meditation (/Buddhism)

Maintenance Sucks… and It’s a Privilege



Sometimes I get really disheartened because I have to do so much side-hustling while the “real job” of being a writer — the job that I’m am trained at, good at and want to do — feels like a shell game.  I keep doing the work, but the target is always moving and it never seems to pay off.

So then I get doubly irritated when, out of the blue, the equivalent of a third unpaid job falls on me. In September, a bathroom pipe in my condo sprang a leak in the middle of the night. In the morning I was on the phone with tenants, the homeowners’ association, plumbers, water mitigation experts, the insurance company and the (rightfully) very irate downstairs neighbor. And for almost two months, hours of each day was consumed by logistics, and communicating those logistics to all the relevant parties. Because of pandemic-related “supply chain issues,” every two minute visit to the Home Depot website for a part became hours of rabbit holing, scrounging and waiting, and then more hours separately explaining and apologizing for those delays to the tenant, the irate neighbor, etc. It was frustrating.

It was also what what my brother-in-law would call a “First Class Problem.”

Because someone could easily say: “Fuck you… YOU OWN A CONDO IN LOS ANGELES. I’ll take that problem off your hands.”

And that person would be right. I can feel frustrated because maintaining property, is tedious, time consuming, expensive— but I should never forget to feel grateful for the circumstance that makes the problem possible.

Which brings me to the stress and tedium of maintaining my other property — the body I live in. Specifically at this moment, the cancer. I’ve had blood draws and CT scans and doctor’s appointments where we discuss doing things to my body I don’t want to do. I have launched a routine that requires hours each week (if not each day) buying, cleaning, cutting and juicing vegetables, then cleaning the juicer and the entire kitchen which some how ends up covered in a carrot / beet blood splatter. It takes more time to meditate, and read medical journal articles on the internet. I wake up some mornings buzzing with anxiety. I may have mentioned on this blog how I get anxious packing for a trip. I worry about making decisions I’ll regret. What if I bring things I don’t need? What if I don’t bring things I need?  And that’s when I’m traveling for a week. So clearly it’s daunting to decide on treatment options that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

But, weird as it seems to say, it is also still a first class problem. I live in a healthy-feeling body — which is an entirely different experience from dealing with all this from a body in pain. I’m editing this as I wait on hold to make a doctor’s appointment because I have health insurance and because my work-from-home situation allows it. My cancer was detected early because I have health care.I’m housed. I have a juicer, access to fresh food and information. And I have friends and family who want to help. I am surrounded by generosity.

The world is touching me, and I am blessed.

Happy #TrainYourBrainDay

Did you know that pretty much every day is a social media holiday? These holidays can be kind of ridiculous (“Nation Grilled Cheese Day” “Walking Day”) and are basically just prompts for generating “content”. I should possibly start using them more for this blog, since the “holiday” also creates a deadline… which is something I apparently need. Once again I will share a Dr. Amy blog I wrote, because I think the topic is pretty interesting — something I would write about here if I ever got around to it. In honor of #TrainYourBrainDay, “Dr. Amy” interviews me about my Muse Brain Sensing Headband, which I use to meditate.

Ironically, as I hurriedly wrote that post about how amazing meditation is, I had also gone more than a week without meditating. How do I know? Because the Muse sent me an email telling me it had been eight days… and that might have been a couple days ago. And you know what? In that time, I’ve grown more frazzled, distracted — feeling under the gun and less able to focus. This happens gradually, then suddenly. For a few days, it doesn’t seem to matter — I’m more preoccupied by items on my to-do list. I pick some item and I tell myself if I can “just get this done” I’ll feel more grounded again, but, of course, I don’t, because it’s not about finishing the random task. Finally, when I’m on the mental skids, I remember (not for the first time) that the to-do list is never going to stop — it’s me who has to stop myself.

Cravings and Mindfulness

Lately I seem to have a to-do list that grows faster than I can trim it, and it’s got me feeling ungrounded. In between checking items off, I just ran into the kitchen, sliced off a swath of butterscotch brownie and shoved it into my mouth as a little “reward.”

But was it a reward that I needed? Did I even take the moment to really enjoy it? In a way, I did — although it was after it was already in my mouth, mid-chew, before swallow — but at least at that point I did remember to slow down for a moment and appreciate the sweetness and slight graininess of the sugar.

Updating this blog is one of those things that has been on my to-do list for awhile, but it hasn’t happened yet, so I thought I’d share this blog post about our craving brains that I wrote for a client’s business blog this week!

Nothing Seems Fair, Part 2

In my last post I mentioned my friend who is having issues with his health and posted on Facebook the status, “nothing seems fair anymore.”  His post got an overwhelming response, because he has so many friends who love him, and also, i think because they are words that hit a cord with all of us.  Because we all suffer, and we all cannot help but notice that some of us seem to suffer more than others.  And what is that all about?  How can we reconcile that we want things, but we don’t get the things that we want–other people get them.  And the things we have, other people want:  Jobs, respect, human rights, health, economic security, freedom from fear and pain. What can we do to avoid being overwhelmed by the UNFAIRNESS of it all?

Last night I attended this mindfullness group I sometimes go to on campus after work.  We had a guest speaker who talked about neuroplasticity, and how we can form new neural pathways and change our temperments and the way we think and feel about events and circumstances. Apparently, through evolution, humans have developed a negative bias when we look at the world, because back in the day it wasn’t as important to remember all the nights that you ducked into a cave and it was empty so you had a good sleep or campfire with roasted elk-meat as it was  to remember the one time you ducked into a cave and found a BEAR inside. The UNPLEASANT experience of running from the bear and shivering in the cold hiding behind a rock was the one you needed to remember in order to avoid the bear caves in the future!

Nowadays, the “negative bias” doesn’t always serve us so well. Say twenty people compliment your outfit but one person makes a snide remark. In this case, focusing on the one negative comment is unnecessary for survival, and bad for your mood. All else being equal, why not think about the nice things that people said, and be happier? And maybe because you’re happier, you’ll be nicer and maybe that will lead to better relationships…etc.

However  (according to this guest speaker’s summary of several books), because we aren’t naturally wired to think about the good things, we have to consciously practice, until our brains starts to do it naturally.  Much of it sounded very similar to cultivating gratitude, of which I’m a fan.

The speaker  gave an example of an exercise where you find something pleasant but overlooked to meditate upon, like “how nice it is to breathe, to have enough air.”  When she said this, I thought, “that’s right! It is pretty awesome to breathe.” And I felt grateful!

WARNING: This is where I should end this blog post, but instead I’m going to veer off track…

…which I think maybe our guest speaker did as well, as I think what she said next was something that occurred to her in the moment and not part of her teaching plan. She said, “I have a friend who has cancer, and when we talked the other day, he told me he was having trouble breathing, that he couldn’t get enough air anymore.”

I think she simply intended to just emphasize even how the simple act of breathing is something to appreciate, kind of like a parent tossing off an aside about being thankful for your food because of starving children in Africa. She didn’t dwell on it. But I did. I am still dwelling.

While statements about other people’s misfortunes can make us feel lucky, I’m not sure they make us happy.  I wonder what kind of neural pathways are formed if one makes a practice of appreciating a thing by contemplating that thing’s absence.

My seven-year-old niece once told me: “we don’t compare, because it doesn’t make anyone feel good,”  She’s right. At work, I’ve deposited monthly paychecks for people that equal my annual pay.  That comparison doesn’t make me happy.  Nor has the specter of starving children ever enhanced my enjoyment of a meal.

Basically, I think comparisons don’t make me feel good, because they highlight what seems to be the inherent lack of fairness in the universe. Not that the universe is intentionally unfair, it’s just that the dice shake out how they do.

Through my two cancer experiences, I experienced emotional and physical pain and I came to know a fair number of people with their own pain. On the other side now (as much as anyone reaches the other side) I am frequently–habitually–grateful for the absence of pain. I’m thankful for every test result that doesn’t predict more pain.  I’m incredibly thankful for my everyday life.  But at the same time — maybe because my work with cultivating gratitude has its roots in illness — I’m acutely aware that my state of blessed health has a random quality to it.  While I healed and my pain went away, others, equally deserving, did not heal. There are people who deal with chronic pain, who are suffering even as I am not suffering. I’m also aware that my own suffering can return at any unexpected moment.

I believe I’ve gotten pretty good at appreciating things great and small which makes me a generally a grateful person. But somehow I’ve also gotten in the habit of, in almost the same moment, considering the tenuous, ephemeral and random nature of whatever thing I’m appreciating, which adds a dollop of sadness onto my gratitude.

On one had I am grateful for, you know, life, because it’s amazing! But on the other hand, my friend is absolutely right: Nothing seems fair, because nothing is. And those are two pretty big and heavy concepts to lift at the same time.

 

Related articles

Scroll back up and click on that “Neuroplasticity” link. It’s a 2-minute video that’s interesting.

The book being discussed by our speaker was called Hardwiring Happiness.

The author did a TED talk.

You might be interested in this cliff’s Notes Version (actually About.com) of the Buddha’s views on suffering.

Here’s an article suggested by this widget that’s attached to my blog:

Lately

I’m sick–just a cold, or maybe the flu.  Everybody talks about the awfulness of the flu, but when I look up the symptoms of flu vs cold online, every cold / flu I’ve ever had seems to fall right on the line between two.  Are muscle aches and fatigue really just the purview of the flu? Well, maybe it’s the flu..

Whatever the diagnosis, I stayed home for two work days, and now I’m staying home through the long weekend.  I have very little will to do…anything.  You know how they say the “mind is a good servant, but a bad master”?  It’s a kinda buddhist thing to say, about how you have to restrain your mind and not just let it run rampant as it likes.  This restraint requires a certain kind of determination that at various times in my life I have had, and at present do not have.  My mind has no desire to do disciplined things like stay still for meditation, apply itself to writing or even pay pay attention to a conversation.  If you call me, there’s a good chance I won’t pick up the phone, because holding a conversation, even with you, seems like too monumental an effort.  My mind doesn’t want to do anything on its own steam, it wants to have its hand held and to be entertained.

And in my current state, my mind wins:

I let it watch two seasons of Downton Abbey in two days until I was bleary-eyed and my brain was sodden and saturated with the stream of soapy input. (Everything in italics is a spoiler, avert your eyes.) She’s pregnant with the new heir of Downton. She’s slipped on a bar of soap left by the wicked servant and miscarried! The heir of Downton is lost at war.  He’s miraculously returned! He’ll never walk again, or bear children.  Oh my god, he’s walking! But he’s about to marry the wrong woman. No, wait–she has Spanish Influenza…she’s dead! The Season Two finale provides some beautiful closure with a proposal on a snowy night.  It was a good and convenient place to stop for what I hope is a long while.
On the third day, I let my mind read seven scripts for the Good Wife.
Because it is not related to writing, it will sometime accept forty minutes of Illustrator CS5 instructional videos, so there’s that.
And of course there is sleeping.