PLAYTIME

March 25th, 2020

How much playtime do you have during a normal day?  It’s a serious question.  And the answer isn’t the same as how much free time you have.  We all have more free time than we realize, and the current situation of many people is probably showing just how poorly we use that free time.

Playtime is something altogether different.  It’s free time with energy.

Whereas most free time is squandered with vegetative activities like Netflix and eating, playtime is a thoughtful, energetic, creative use of free time.

We can think of it for a moment in terms of money.  Many many people don’t have much money to play around with.  Certainly money is squandered, but this is different.  To play with money in this instance does not mean what it can get you, but what it can do for you.  The wealthy play with money in a way that those living paycheck to paycheck laugh at in self-deprecating ways.  The wealthy try to figure out where they can plug their money, usually in order to see if it’ll result in more money.  Those truly invoking the notion of play put their money into an idea to see if that idea can be brought to life.  Those with less money don’t play in this way, they go to a restaurant, or take a trip, or buy that fancy do-dad that they’ve always wanted.

Now let’s return to time.

How is that free time being used?  Is it squandered on petty pleasure? 

Or is it being leveraged by curiosity?  Is it being mined for possibility, is it being put to the test by experiment?

MEDITATION: WANDERING WAVE

March 24th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to an individual on Twitter who goes by the handle @Cojaill.

All of us are usually surfing.  Sounds fun, but some of these waves are enormous, of a size that we often do not have the skill to surf.  These monsters curl in on us and shake us from our balance, then crush us down into the turbulence. We are battered and bruised, and yet we go back for more, as though compelled by some kind of spiritual masochism.

Consider waves in this way:  Can you have a wave without water?

What about water without the wave?

Of course, we can have calm seas.

So too with the mind.  You can have a mind  without thought – though it is rare, tricky and often requires much practice.  But you cannot have a thought without the mind.

Observe now as this thought ripples through your consciousness.  This concept is a kind of wave that is shaping your sense of what it means to exist right now.  That is, if you’re paying attention.  Otherwise, it’s something else.  The smell of cooking from the kitchen.  The pretty girl who just walked by.  The ach and pain from the toe you just stubbed.  The embarrassing episode from last week that still lingers, as though haunting you.  Whatever it is that’s taking up the most real estate in your mind at the moment is shaping it. 

We think of our minds generally like containers, and thoughts are some how doing their thing inside that container, that is, our head, our skull.  But the reality is a bit inside out.  Our mind is wherever our attention is, and if you pay close attention, it’s possible to see that there’s nothing confirming that it’s somehow inside your head.  All you have to do is sit down in the theater and watch a fantastically engrossing movie.  You feel transported.  Who’s to say you aren’t?

What’s even more accurate is to forget about where the mind is, but rather be concerned with it’s shape. 

That great movie is a wave that is moving through your mind, bending your mind, warping it, eliciting all sorts of aspects as it does.

Many of us are wandering waves in search of calm seas.

But realize, a wandering wave will never find a calm sea, always failing to understand that what it seeks is always present but corrupted by the seeking.

Meditation is first about gaining the ability to simply see the waves as they pass through your visceral experience of existing.  To see the anger rise up like a huge wave and pass through you, hot as a bright iron, seeking to crush you, crumble you and bend you to say those awful things.  But if you can see it, you can eventually gain the ability to just watch it pass.

With enough practice, your gaze eventually has a soothing effect on these waves.  They becomes less prominent as you realize how unnecessary so many of them are.  Eventually, when you give up that incessant habit to climb atop the waves and try to surf, no matter how fun or dangerous.  Eventually, you find the calm sea, right where you are, just where it has always been.

RESPAWN

March 23rd, 2020

If you woke up in a different place, at a different time, could you wake up as a different person?  A different time and place would certainly help.  This is part of the reason why people sometimes let go of their life, and move to a different city, a different place in order to start over.  It’s not so much that there’s a problem with the things around us, it’s that these things, these habits, these people, the interactions keep our own personality contained in a certain rut of behavior. 

Waking up in the same place, at the same time, with suddenly nothing to do is a tricky situation.  It’s one that many people find themselves in right now as normal schedules are obliterated.  Where is the structure?  Where is the routine?  Without these things time seems to smear, slurring into day after day.  The moment can seem achingly slow, meanwhile days seem to tick off faster than seconds.

In this circumstance it’s incredibly valuable to have personal habits, and it’s a perfect opportunity to try and create some new habits.

When it seems like there’s nothing to do, this is a sign that it’s time to experiment.  To try out new ways of behaving, operating and thinking.  Or to kindle that nearly lost idea to life. 

You have humanity’s greatest research tool literally at your fingertips.

It’s time to explore, create, iterate, and stretch the sense you have of who you are.

In a game, when you fall off a cliff or lose a battle, you usually respawn not far from where you left off.  In a way this happens everyday for everyone.  We wake up, and this is a kind of restart, a respawn.  We get another chance at life, another opportunity to explore and experiment.  Finally we are forced against doing the same old thing that we’ve done day after day.  Perhaps it’s time to take things in a new direction.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GENTLE PERSUASION

March 22nd, 2020

Lucilius was enjoying a particularly lovely stretch of his life when he spent every morning reading at a coffee shop.  He’d fallen into the routine and found that he looked forward to the habit even when he had a particularly difficult book on the chopping block.  He was in the middle of one of these weighty philosophical works when the normal sounds of the coffee shop were pierced.  The light chatter, the clack of dishes, the rush of steam wands and groaning espressos suddenly fell mute to the yelling of the shop owner who was frantically pointing at the door.

Lucilius looked up to see a young man in baggy clothes fleeing the shop, an orange backpack half slung on a shoulder and his arms clutching a bundle of juice bottles to his chest. 

The thief was gone before anyone could really react.  The shop owner muttered curses as he went into a back room, and quickly the normal noise of the joint came back up to it’s cozy volume.

This happened again a week later.  Like everyone else, Lucilius didn’t notice until the thief was practically gone, and this time, the owner’s cursing was less restrained, his characterization of the young man growing harsh and honest.  But nothing was really to be done.  The police wouldn’t do anything over bottles of juice.

Some days later, Lucilius was again enjoying his morning routine, engrossed in a book when his attention was unusually caught.  In the hard periphery of his vision he recognized a movement, a certain haste, a rhythm of action.  He looked up from his book to see the same young man, the thief opening the door.  The young man quickly went to the open display and swiftly scooped up half a dozen bottles of expensive hand pressed juices.  But when he turned to run back out the door, Lucilius was standing in front of the door.

“Hi,” Lucilius said.

The young man’s eyes grew wide and frantic filled his face as he quickly looked around for another route of escape.

“If you want those, I’ll pay for them,” Lucilius said.

Even in his high-strung need to flee, this caught the thief strangely unguarded.

“What? Get out of my way!” the young man sneered.

“I just need to see how many you have.  What is that? Eight?”

The thief briefly looked down.

“Yea, look like eight,” Lucilius said.  “Ok,”  and then Lucilius stood aside and opened the door.  He took out his wallet and started counting out cash as the young man ran past.

Lucilius went up to the counter where a confused barista and the owner stood.  Everyone had watched the scene unfold end everyone in the coffee shop was looking at Lucilius. 

“Eight juices?  How much that?”

The owner shook his head.  “I can’t let you pay for that scum.”

Lucilius’ face grew hard.  “Yes you will.”  Lucilius looked at the barista who stood before the cash register and his expression threw her into the motions, ringing up a total for him.

“But why?  How can you pay for that scum?”  The owner pleaded.

Lucilius shrugged as he counted out cash.  “Guy clearly needs juice.  Certainly needs it way more than I do.”

Lucilius paid for the juices and then went back to his reading.

A week later he was doing the same when a strange feeling overcame him.  He looked up from the page and through the window, some distance away from the coffee shop Lucilius saw the same young man.  He’d clearly stopped having seen Lucilius through the window.  Their eyes met and Lucilius raised his coffee mug, as if to gesture a cheers to him.  The young man then quickly turned and walked away.

Lucilius took a sip of the hot and bitter drink.  And then he went back to his reading.

PRACTICING CONTRADICTIONS

March 21st, 2020

Seneca once wrote that “Only the wise man is content with what is his.  All foolishness suffers the burden of dissatisfaction with itself.”

And yet he was a very accomplished statesman, philosopher, orator and he was wealthy.  You’d think someone who wrote a line like the one above would be a humble monk with nearly nothing.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Taking the ideas of these two thinkers hand in hand would have us reason that all progress depends on the fool who is unwisely dissatisfied with what he has.

Both thinkers have good points, but they don’t seem to align.  It’s easy to read each and find ourselves nodding in agreement.  But there’s clear dissonance. 

How do we make sense of that?

People have a funny sense when it comes to continuity, especially continuity of character.  It’s inherent to the large majority of us to try and remain stable in who we are, even if that continuity is only really evident to our perspective.  This is the reason why social accountability works.  One way to get yourself to stick to a new and difficult habit is to tell everyone you know that you’re doing it.  Then there’s social pressure to remain consistent with your word. 

This continuity is, ironically, not entirely consistent.  We are quite literally riddled with contradictions, from which we operate.

There’s a phrase that comes to mind in order to solve this paradox of inconsistent continuity:

There’s a time and a place.

John Steinbeck once wrote:  “When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.”

The same applies to situations.  When you put a person in a new situation, you get a new person.  And the key to understanding the incongruence between the ideas we began with is to realize that there’s a time and a place for each.

It’s good to be a little foolish and suppose you can make progress, by being unreasonable, and pushing the world to change in line with what you imagine.

But it’s also good to practice the ability of being content with what you have.  They are not mutually exclusive, each is a tool depending on the moment.  If we find ourselves in a situation where we really are powerless, then calling up a well-oiled practice of being content with what one has is immensely useful.  In fact it primes a person to act affectively when the situation finally does change, when the gates once again open and the race is back on.

Continuity of character portrays a concept of human behavior that is too simplistic.  Yes, it’s incredibly important to have continuity of truth and honesty, especially in relationships.  Again, that is the time and place for an incredible adherence to continuity of character.  But it is provincial to push one’s entire way of being through this processor.

You don’t drive around in just first gear, you have to switch gears depending on the circumstance, and sometimes, you have to throw it into high gear.  This does not mean we abandon first gear forever. 

Adaptation is a matter of being able to switch gears to fit the circumstance, and sometimes that means running on a gear that allows you to change the circumstance.