Some Lessons to Learn

Numbers one and five seem particularly apt for me.

The Simple Things

"The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time."

— Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould

Things Big and Little

"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is."

— Thomas Szasz

Your Ai Mindfulness Coach

Ai summary: Cures for low-level anxiety focus on natural lifestyle adjustments, stress management techniques and behavioral shifts, such as deep breathing, exercise, meditation and limiting caffeine. Effective, immediate techniques include grounding exercises (like the 5-4-3-2-1 technique), journaling and engaging in calming hobbies to reduce stress hormone levels. 

Key Natural Coping Strategies:

Grounding & Relaxation: Practice deep breathing exercises, the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory technique (five things you see, four feel, three hear, two smell, one taste), or use a weighted blanket to trigger the body’s relaxation response.

Lifestyle Adjustments: Prioritize 7-9 hours of sleep, maintain a balanced diet to avoid blood sugar drops and limit caffeine and alcohol consumption.

Physical Activity: Regular, moderate exercise or yoga helps metabolize excess stress chemicals and boosts endorphins.

Mindfulness & Routine: Meditate, journal thoughts or use a set daily routine to reduce feelings of being overwhelmed.

“What-If” Analysis: Actively challenge anxious thoughts by asking, “What is the worst-case scenario?” to stop repetitive, worrying thought cycles. 

Being Alive

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) was a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist and author who was called the "father of mindfulness." He popularized Engaged Buddhism, which applies Buddhist insights to social, political and environmental issues (Ai summary).

Very Alert, Very Still

“Life isn’t ‘about’ air raids, swamis, love affairs, places, deeds done or undone — those are only the shapes of the letters in which the message is written. To read the message, that’s all that matters. But how? By being very alert, very still. By holding your breath and listening, always, everywhere, in the midst of this earsplitting uproar.”

— Christopher Isherwood’s diary, Sept. 20, 1944

The Clock in the Storm

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

And to think that Stevenson lived in the 19th century, not the 21st. I have long maintained that mindfulness practice is a necessary antidote to the digital age’s unabated assault on our attention and ability to focus.

How a Poet Saw America

"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many.

"We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. 

"All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."

— Mary Oliver

The Answer is Attention

The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties. 

We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.

After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”

And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.

The Answer from the Sea

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall—

what should I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

“Excuse me, I have work to do.”

― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

Listen for the Chime

“Many elderly friends have what I call the chime,” wrote novelist Anne Lamott. “It is a vibrating energy that certain artistic and spiritual people exude, as do people with a basic spirit of generosity. Almost silent, the chime rings like a tiny triangle off in the expanse. The chime is life and is in all of us, but it tends to be muffled until much of the clamor and hustle of existence quiets down. I hear it most often in the elderly, whose days are quieter, who gladly ruminate and gaze out windows a lot. They may appear frail, but there is strength in this fragility.

“Do not mess with the very old and their gangs. I see them live with grace and (sometimes cranky) humor, along with infirmity, pain, wobbly brains and the scar tissue of decades enduring the blows and losses splattered through human life. They laugh gently at me when they hear me once again in do-or-die mode: They’ve seen over and over that most things will be okay as long as we’re tender with each other. They are whom I want to be in 10 years, if I am alive and can remember this one thing.”

Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

--

My favorite poem. It’s by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation by John Dryden

Sanity, Not Salvation

“An agnostic Buddhist looks to the dharma for metaphors of existential confrontation rather than metaphors of existential consolation,” wrote Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Belief. 

“The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. It starts by facing up to the primacy of anguish, then proceeds to apply a set of practices to understand the human dilemma and work toward a resolution. 

“The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of the Buddha.”

Driven by a Surge of Impulses

“Much of the time we are driven by a relentless and insistent surge of impulses. We notice this in quiet moments of reflection, but usually just get carried along on the crest of its wave. Until, that is, we crash once more onto the rocks of recriminatory self-criticism, and from there into moods and depressions.”

“Worrying about what a friend said can preoccupy us so completely that it isolates us from the rest of our experience. The world of colors and shapes, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations becomes dull and remote… We feel cut off and adrift.

“To stop and pay attention to what is happening in the moment is one way of snapping out of such fixations. It is also a reasonable definition of meditation.”

— Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Belief

In Control of Consciousness

“Despite its great powers, attention cannot step beyond (its) limits,” observed Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  “It cannot notice or hold in focus more information than can be processed simultaneously. Retrieving information from memory storage and bringing it into the focus of awareness, comparing information, evaluating, deciding — all make demands on the mind’s limited processing capacity. For example, the driver who notices the swerving car will have to stop talking on his cellular phone if he wants to avoid an accident.

“Some people learn to use this priceless resource efficiently, while others waste it. The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”

Now consider what digital media has done to shorten the human attention span in the decades since this was written. What does that imply about the ability “to enjoy the normal course of everyday life?”

The Secret of Nostalgia

The simple secret to nostalgia for the past is that we know how things turn out, a comfort that the present reality — the only reality — never gives us. 

It's like a favorite movie we can watch again and again.

Check This Out

The strange sights of 2023: eight or 10 people were waiting in line at the Walmart self check-out station while, right next to it, a cashier stands patiently waiting for customers.

I could only presume that a) they had taken up waiting in line as a hobby, or b) they had been digitally trained to avoid all human contact, or c) they’re shoplifters.

I might have come up with more possible explanations, but I was already out the door with my purchases while they were still waiting.

Habit and Happiness: A Ritual Reminder

Author Allan G. Hunter advocates “…a form of ritual that reminds us how we wish to live.”

“My own ritual of leaving work includes such things as making sure I hold doors for others as I leave the building, rather than rushing through, and if I drive I make sure to let other cars go first,” Hunter wrote. 

“Most people are anxious to get home, so it’s actually a good idea to be out of the way of anxious drivers. I do it for another reason, though. I do it to remind myself that I’m going, where I want the atmosphere to be helpful and considerate, and I may as well practice that along the way. I’ve tried jumping into my car and racing home to complain about my colleagues. I did for years. It wastes a perfectly good evening.

“And that brings us neatly to the concept of how you can deal with this is you’re working from home. Be very careful about this, or you will turn your entire home into your workplace, and you’ll never actually leave work.”

Thich Nhat Hanh had a similar idea. “We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves,” he advised. “And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.”

A Dialogue with a Dog

George the Beagador thinks he has arguments with me, but his vocabulary is extremely limited, like Groot’s.

It begins when George stares at me fixedly with his yellow Rosemary’s Baby eyes.

“No,” I reply, “you don’t need to go outside. I just took you outside.”

“Woo woo,” George says, in a distinctly argumentative tone.

“But I just took you out a couple of hours ago. You don’t need to go!”

“Woo woo!!”

“No, George, I am NOT taking you outside again! That is absolutely final!!!”

“Woo woo WOO!!!”

And then I take him outside.

George always wins those arguments we don’t have.

The Demi-Beagle Lays Down the Law

George’s Rules

1) Motor scooters and bicycles are forbidden.

2) Horses are an outrage.

3) How dare squirrels exist.

4) The pillows are mine. I have plans for them.

5) Paul may not sneeze. Others may, but not Paul.

The real George the beagador.