Traveling

Yeah, I don’t really care about traveling. The whole thing is generally harder than usual life, and I don’t find it particularly relaxing. I get a lot of anxiety about things like where to sleep and eat, and how to use the public transportation or read the road signs. It’s cool to do stuff, for sure, and see things and go places, don’t get me wrong. Like THIS post from my friend Katie’s travels – I mean, how could you not want to see that? But I am not going to travel the world to do that. Sounds hard.

While on vacation, I enjoyed having no responsibilities, I guess. And my parents are pretty organized and motivated to go sight-seeing (bleh, stressful and cattle-call feeling to me usually), so that level of decision-making was also taken care of, and that was nice. But really I wanted to be home working on my projects. My guitar practice was going really well, and of course Le Blogge needs a-tendin’, and I didn’t get to do my yoga stuff while on vacation (no mat, no private empty space), so leaving all the active threads of my mind behind was a little tough. Naturally I could have found ways to make it all continue for the 8-9 days we were on the ground, but come on, I was supposed to be there to see my folks and see Germany, and it was only a week.

So by the end of the week+, I was ready to head out. I wanted to be back in action on my personal self-fulfillment/improvement stuff. And I am wondering about a few things related to this feeling: one, is feeling ho-hum about travel an entitled way of thinking, an unsophisticated way of thinking, or a legitimate preference? Two, is my preference for my carefully crafted self-distractions a crutch for my mind or an investment in my mind expansion? Probably everything is true in one way or another.

As far as the ho-hum travel thing goes, the entitled interpretation is that I have no idea what a neat opportunity it is to go abroad. This could be because I have been abroad enough times in enough ways, and I have my own ideas about what it means to travel well, that I don’t feel impressed or blown away by Western sight-seeing. One church after another or one lovely vista after another, it doesn’t matter. The best thing we did in Germany was go to a parade in the tiny home town of one of my Dad’s friends, and have beer in a big tent with the whole town singing Bavarian songs to an oom-pa band. This experience was more about the human interaction and participating in community than anything, and I like that when I’m at home, too (it's a breadth/depth thing - I think as we get older we crave depth above breadth). So whatever. The unsophisticated interpretation is that I am a pedestrian and closed-minded person who can’t be ripped away from her own comforts for ten minutes to open her mind to other ways of living and thinking. This could be true because, well, at this point in my life, I don’t feel like more “input” is what I need. I need LESS input. I’m finding it challenging enough to work on breathing in and out without going insane, and whether or not another country of humans on the planet yield the right of way for left-hand turns doesn’t rock me, it overloads me. Wait, hm - Germans in the south sunbathe naked near the water like it’s no big deal in the cities’ public parks and the countryside’s hiking trails, and it made me a little sad that America isn’t that chill about it, and I did think about that a little for a while. Okay so lastly, the legitimate preference option means that I just like to stay put, really, and that’s fine. I might be turning, at last, into one of those people who just wishes she could move her whole apartment to the beach for two weeks and not go to work, and that would be the perfect vacation. No driving, no phones, no t.v., just reading and exercising and sunning and swimming and cookouts. Pretty American approach to vacation, actually, at least as far as my own memories of vacationing on Cape Cod as a kid goes. I think my feelings about travel are all of these things. I am both entitled and unsophisticated and have legitimate feelings and maybe want to recreate my childhood and it’s all fine. I want to travel by going to somewhere else and staying put for a while and working on stuff. That’s what I like.

And next: is my desire to stay put and work on my little projects a weakness or a positive thing? On the one hand, it would be nice to feel totally okay with the unproductiveness of traveling instead of thinking about what I want to get done when I get home. It’s a be-here-now problem. And I think I am generally okay with being-there-now, and I enjoyed the countryside and the weather and walks and certainly enjoyed myself. But I feel un-tethered from life when I can’t engage with myself in a more focused, learning- and progress-based way, and it expands my enjoyment of things outside myself as well as makes little connections in my mind that complete my understanding of the way I view things blah blah blah. So it could be that my mind prefers the discipline and the feeling of working toward something, and I really get something good out of it. But this could be a crutch – instead of being-here-now, I would rather elaborately occupy myself with mental departures that take me outside my mind, because I find simply enjoying life to be boring, because really I am boring and my mind is not actually a great place for me to be. Hm. So, as you may have guessed, I think both these things are true, too.

Ah travel, sneakily enough it was mind-expanding, though, regardless of my resistance and toe-tapping, since it made me consider some stuff about myself. Well played, Travel.

Apartment. Job. T.V.

My mind has been spinning a lot lately. A lot to learn at my job, an apartment to find (found! it's pretty great, we'll see how the 'hood and neighbors work out), stuff to prioritize in general. Haven't played guitar in a few weeks, which I feel a little bummed about since I was really on a roll and having some nice insights. It's okay, it's still there. Yoga practice has been going pretty well - my new job is pretty physical, which I looooove, and oh lordy do I need to stretch and zero out my body regularly. Yoga feels awesome right now.

So then let's talk about t.v. First, my friend started a sweet blog tearing up some t.v. shows and it's hilarious: http://onlyfifteenminutes.wordpress.com/. Enjoy. This prompts me to confess some t.v. watching. I have definitely been watching some t.v. and feel like I'm on the edge of another round of creating a Firm Policy for my own good. Here is the stuff I am liking:

1. House. Scruffy, sexy, emotionally addled Dr. Gregory House, genius diagnostician at Princeton teaching hospital, banters indecorously with his colleagues about their personal motivations and brilliantly makes what is basic, like, totally meta, with philosophical loyalty to his one unwavering truth: everyone lies. Underplot of the show: someone is sick, they figure it out, they were wrong, the patient almost dies, they figure it out FOR REAL this time, the patient gets worse, they reassess, more almost fatal emergencies happen, the patient is usually saved and House usually realizes something important or falls deeper into his Lonely Man hole. Ha ha, lonely man hole, nice.

2. The Biggest Loser (just the highlights). I like to skip huge chunks of the "substance" of this show and get straight to the obese people crying into the camera. I love this show. I love the people trying to reclaim their lives from the deep, plush couches of their sloth huts where they consume their bagged food and receive their daily programming from the great shining cyclops screen in their living rooms. While my love of this show is part marvel/disgust, it is mostly rapturous uplift in the triumph of the human spirit and excitement about people rejecting the crappy version of life that they didn't really think they could lead differently. It's pretty amazing.

3. The Office. Yes, I got hooked on this in law school, and watched two and half seasons in about three sittings while in stress recovery on winter vacation. Now I like to see what happens. This show has become mostly the story of how total weirdos find love, not just the attractive and normal people that it's obvious to root for, but the real social lame-os. It's a great premise, full of hilarity. I really appreciated this show as ground-breaking for its cringe-humor approach - with an idiot boss in the office serving as the all-purpose deus ex machina for any number of unbearably awkward situations. I'm sort of over it, though, it may have jumped the shark, but I'm not sure. But I must say that the latest episode with Michael proposing to Holly made me choke up a little. It's on hulu for the next few weeks. Enjoy this, also.

4. Sometimes 30 Rock. Maybe Being Erica. Maybe The Simpsons. Maybe the Saturday Night Live clips on hulu. Anything comedy instant streaming on Netflix, even really bad stuff. Basically anything not-too-stressful or upsetting to take me away for a little bit.

So what is t.v. for? It's fascinating - there's so much happening to get all sociological about, especially reality shows (my friend's blog does a very amusing job of cutting the crap on the happenings of the show to articulate the maggot growth beneath the belly of the programs). Ever see that show "My Super Sweet 16" on MTV? Well, young ladies get really excited to have their super rich and entitled lives put on t.v. while they freak out about a party they want to have complete with BMWs for gifts, celebrity entertainment, and magnificent temper tantrums. They think they are important and cool, while really the point of the show is that their selfish, oblivious greed is a circus, and we are laughing at, not with them. So interesting on several levels.

SIGH. But it's all crap, right? Should a contemporary person participate in t.v. watching? Or something that we are forced into having a "moderate" relationship with? For me, t.v. is still basically cocaine - well, maybe more like booze - if I have a little bit, it takes over my head and my life gets scheduled around t.v. watching. I actually sort of love having time all alone to let all my self-improvement crap go to hell so I can watch terrible t.v. without anyone around to judge me. Lordy lordy, okay, I'll come up with some kind of plan for this. Still working on this particular habit of mine. I get so conflicted about it, in a so bad it's good kind of way. Buh.

Buried Longing

I think I described my doing this yoga training as my attending to a buried longing. This is true, I’ve wanted to do it for a while, or at least I felt that I had started something with yoga that I never finished, and doing this training class puts a finishing coat on top of the little back yard deck I was building. And now that I'm almost fully equipped for yoga grilling on the deck, as it were, it feels pretty nice.

And this week at Yoga Sutras discussion group in Rhinebeck, we talked about the 11th sutra, which is translated from the Sanskrit in my edition as follows: “when a mental modification of an object previously experienced and not forgotten comes back to consciousness, that is memory.” “Memory” is one of the five mental functions that the Yoga Sutras identifies – the others being sleep/stupor, misconception, verbal delusion, and right knowledge. Seems sort of like there’s only one good one out of those, but whatever. So, one of the scholarly expositions of the “memory” sutra explained that our mind returns again and again to past events when they are in some way incomplete experiences in our mind. That made sense to me; I definitely think more about things that don’t feel completed, or over yet (and thinking about them again and again of course makes them continue to feel “not over”). Either because my ego was injured, or I felt misunderstood, or I had some expectation of how things should have gone (but they didn’t go that way), or it was upsetting in a way that left a lingering sense of vulnerability that leaves a feeling of exposure within me, (which is a kind of incompleteness of my own comfort), I certainly spend some time revisiting memories.

Where does finishing what one started fit into this feeling? I think that I have go-to-South-America fantasies mostly out of a sense that my Spanish-speaking is only okay, and I know how much better it could be, but I haven’t managed to find the space in my life yet to finish that project. It’s not complete for me. I mean I’ll be fine if I never work on my Spanish again, really – even though it’s excellent to be taking care of the yoga stuff, the feeling of “completeness” isn’t some magical filler making that part of me feel done. But it’s good. So having started something and have it not be wrapped up in the way I imagined has created this sort of memory-repetition for me; it would be good to finish what I started so it can feel complete.

One Freakin' Thing at a Time

I was discussing yesterday with Friend the issue of submitting to an entire religion or philosophy whole heartedly, believing (and presumably also adhering to) every aspect of it, as opposed to taking what you want and not worrying too much about the rest. Friend suggested that maybe this was a Western thing, this feeling that participating in something that you only kind of mostly believe is insincere, or deceptive, or at least an incomplete experience. A spiritual path would be diluted if it were only guidelines, left to each semi-adherent to adjust it as s/he sees fit, no? What are you looking for if you want to keep your own ideas whole and just sort of be affected or moved by something - you're certainly not looking for change or for god, right?

Well, I don't know. I love that I can enjoy Buddhism without having to worry too much about samsara and karma. I love this so much that - bear with me here - I got myself all excited about going to divinity school. Really. I mean hell, why not? I'd love to study the Bible for reals, and if I can enjoy it for what it offers and shed the rest, well, that would be great! Actual Xtians already do this - it's not like all those Xtians wear strictly single-fiber clothes as the Bible commands, etc etc all that other crap that nobody pays attention to. As the secular world so frequently likes to point out to crazy bigoted fundamentalists, there's an awful lot of cherry picking of the Bible that goes on. And sometimes it's evil and used to justify meanness, but sometimes it's great - HERE is an awesome radio story about an evangelical preacher who decides that there is no hell. And his revelation is really persuasive and moving and makes me like Jesus so much more, and makes the crucifixion make so much sense that it goes beyond sensible and back to magical. But anyway thinking about the take-it-or-leave-it part of religion and philosophy made me excited about being able to actually enjoy Xtianity stuff (because whoa nelly believe you me normally I wouldn't really want to be associated with all the stuff that goes on under that umbrella), especially if I can just make it my own.

So yeah back to this - right now in my fantasy life if I could go to divinity school and become a pastor-type thing that would be awesome. Which at last brings me to my actual point: one freakin' thing at a time, pal. This is a kind of curse of the contemporary purposeless human (which is me, so maybe it's just me), this feeling that there is something really huge and complete that you can/should be working toward, and that whatever you're doing at the moment isn't really what you should be working on unless it's part of this bigger thing, and you should maybe hurry up and figure out what your bigger thing is so you can feel peacefully ready to die someday, and death, by the way, will happen before you know it. School is so handy for that feeling. You get to have the manageable task thing from semester to semester, and it's all part of Your Important Degree, and everyone agrees in our cultural that Education is Really Important, and it's just a highly credible long-term thing to be doing.

But right so with this potential new permissive kind of belief I started letting all these things about myself take form in a litte spirituality orb, adding pieces of my philosophical self (law degree! totally read part of a book by Aristotle that one time! I have completely heard of Plato and the Situationists!); my spiritual self (read most of a book by a real live Buddhist! totally learning about yoga! meditate sort of!); my other hobbies (playing music! and I took some Latin in college, those are totally religious things!); and my personality (kind of a talkative know-it-all, enjoy writing a blog, so perfect for a preacher-type!), and made a little fantasy about becoming a woman of the cloth and quoting Joseph Campbell and just digging life and having something really big to be working on, and feeling finally like all the freakin' hats I've tried on in the last 32 years will actually make one cohesive outfit. Of hats. Whatever.

Okay, slow down. Not even one third of the way through my yoga training. That half of that Aristotle book was kind of boring. Still have to finish the Buddha book anyway. Need to get a job. I sometimes can get myself worked up about a big purpose to the point that I can't even actually take the steps required to finish one tiny component part of the fantasy. It's like this: "I can't read this book on yoga, I'm too busy becoming a yogi." Anyone picking up what I'm putting down, here? So my mission for the foreseeable future is to do one thing at a time and actually enjoy it and not worry that too much time is passing without me making important strides toward my Real Big Purpose in life, and that I'm not losing time or progress or anything if I don't start on a Bible-reading regimen or start a philosophy book club or brush up on my Latin all by next month. Chillax. One freakin' thing at a time. My actual life in this actual moment is really nice and has the benefit of leading me toward something big, yoga teaching! That's big enough. Hell being happy is big enough. That's what I'm going to work on.

Another Yoga Time Weekend: Breathing

So this past weekend the yoga teacher training was focused on breathing, or pranayama. This is one of the eight petals of yoga. Iygengar says it's pretty dangerous to practice deliberate, harnessed breathing without guidance, and that the potential for depression is high if practiced incorrectly. Man oh man. Well, I already know that the potential for pulling one's back like an over-eager jackass is also pretty high in yoga (oh ye physical discipline of healing), so I can roll with there being dangers in breathing. Oh and here's a youtube of Iyengar taking an inhale and an exhale which is certainly persuasive of the potential for meaningful control of one's breath, regardless of to what extent one credits the effects of such control.

But I do credit the effects - meditation is a breathing exercise, that's the whole thing. And it is profound to feel the unstoppable effort of our diaphragm rising and falling with the inhale and exhale, completely without our effort, like the heartbeat. Really I think the breathing part of yoga is super awesome. This weekend I learned that can isolate my breathing to expand my ribcage solely in the right side of my body. This is rad to me.

But somehow I was drifting a little bit into "yeah okay whatever"-ville during the weekend. Why? We had a guest speaker who studied with T.K.V. Desikachar in India, so that's neat. I should have been more interested in it than I was. For some reason I was very scattered of mind. I was sort of hungry the whole time, which doesn't help my concentration - I was traveling all weekend so my usual persnickety micro-organizing of my physical state was a little bit shambled. What was happening though that I wasn't really super focused on it? Boredom? Nah, I'm a little old for that, I can get what I want out of things without it being slick and ultra-compelling.

Maybe it was the cursory nature? Six hours of talking about and practicing different breathing techniques seems like a lot but it's not. I guess I still want a teacher that I can call my teacher. I remember once the Buddha guy relating a story about his teacher, and he said, "this was before he was my teacher, this was when he was just the guy teaching the class." So I know that having a "teacher" is much more than attending classes with people. I still feel a little bit adrift in my learning process. I can probably bump it up a little by doing all those handy learning things that I know how to do: systematize and break down chunks of information for handy memorizing. That's time consuming and creates a feeling of progress. Maybe I was just a little annoyed that my back was limiting my participation. Maybe I'm lazy.

There was a lot of great and interesting stuff that I got out of it, though. I am going to practice one of the breathing things every day for a few weeks and see how I feel (not that I live any kind of controlled variable way, but we'll see what I notice). And the personal stuff was interesting, too - the guest speaker started out talking about his own journey into yoga practice, and a lot of it rang true to me, and was exciting to hear about. He talked about the process of learning to see himself and how he grieved the loss of his former self even as he was happy to be newly revealed. He talked about finding his ability to concentrate, how he had felt cut adrift in his mind for years, and yoga helped him return to a more focused state of mind. I am really tempted by the focus thing - wouldn't we all like to feel like we can actually do things we are trying to do?

But maybe that's the other problem - I don't feel any particular longing toward some thing that I just wish wish wish I could be doing. Maybe because I'm already doing the yoga and stuff so I don't have to be sitting at my desk wishing I could be doing yoga. But it's still so directionless, all this yoga doing and meditating and reading. It's great, but so what? I would really like to feel some kind of drive toward something specific; but of course maybe that's a hang up and I just need to shed that expectation for myself. I might actually want to be a yoga teacher, a good one, not just a student - that would be a great thing to be working on. I'm not sure yet, though. There's so much to do still, and so much to learn about, and so much practicing to do.

Rewarductivity

The opposite of salty is . . . potato. I know the opposite of salty is supposed to be sweet, but opposite is such a slippery idea. Potatoes are the anti-salt, you put a potato in your soup if it's too salty and it'll soak it up. Sweet is the opposing sensation to salty, and actually I really like things that are both salty and sweet, so I think their opposition is nicely complementary. Hm, just like salt complements potatoes.

Well whatever, that's going nowhere - anyway, the point here is about time-wasting. I don't like to feel like I'm wasting my time - I would like to do the opposite of waste my time - and the first term that comes to mind is to be productive. Productivity is the first opposite of time-wasting.

Feeling productive makes me feel happy. It makes me feel like I am using my time on the planet responsibly. Lots of people have lots of little auxiliary responsibilities that they can always be plugging away at, like the garden, or their house, or pets, or whatever. I think it's about having some kind of forum for directed effort in the down time so that the days don't go to waste. Lately I am enjoying practicing the guitar in my otherwise unoccupied time. My long term goal is to become Angus Young. This definitely makes me feel I am not wasting my life.

So what does productivity mean? When I think of something productive, I think of something with measurable gain attached to it. Like fewer weeds in the garden, a walked and fed pet, an at-last-finished kitchen sideboard. And on the other side would be things that are clearly not productive, like tv watching, pacing the house while avoiding doing the dishes, sitting in gridlock for two hours. Usually no measurable gain comes out of time spent this way.

But I can feel extremely productive without having anything to show for it, too, so I'm not sure measurable gain is what I mean by productivity. Yesterday I went for a big old hike up Ashokan High Point near Boiceville. The weather was great, and it was very pretty, and the views at the top of the hike were super duper. The hike was more than I bargained for physically, so at the top of the hike I rested in the sun, ate my snack, did my meditation for the day, and let my sweaty clothes dry out before heading back down the trail. Eventually a German tourist couple came along and we chit-chatted ("The area is very lonely with companies, yes? What is the economy here, where are you have a job? Do you use the Google for your travels?") and scouted out other views together, and it was all very nice. I have no feeling that this was wasted time, nor do I have anything really to show for it progress-wise (except maybe exerting myself helps get me into shape and is good for my health etc, oh, well maybe reaching the top of the hike could be the productivity, but whatever). So I think what I mean by "productive" is actually "rewarding," in that I want to spend my time doing things that are rewarding, and these things are inherently productive (ie the opposite of wasteful). It's just that what is usually rewarding to us is something with a measurable gain. But seeing the scenery was rewarding, and so was reaching the top of the hike, sitting in solitude in the sunshine, and meeting nice people.

I was thinking about this as I got back in the car and realized my hike had taken up over 7 and a half hours of the day. 50 minutes there, 50 minutes back, and I spent a total of 6 hours hiking and hanging out. I didn't even realize the time was gone by except that I was getting really hungry. And then I started to wonder if I would get enough "done" with the rest of the day and be sufficiently productive. The short answer is no, I didn't get what I usually consider to be "enough" done once I got back and had some dinner and assessed how tired I was. But I didn't feel terrible about losing or wasting time, or failing to make progress on other things. The day had been rewarding enough not to have to be productive in the usual sense.

Yes, rewarding is the new standard term for responsible time-spending, not productivity. Rewarding is the second, and I think better, opposite of wasteful.