Views and Interviews - Online Journal

My mother died last Saturday, October 20th, just a bit after noon. Her death was very peaceful, though quicker than anyone expected.  I spoke with her only Friday morning and she was quite clear although very tired.  Then Friday night she got much weaker and the nursing home folks called my brother, and he called me.  I had been planning to visit her this week but Friday, as it became clear that that would be too late, I tried to find a way to get there sooner.  I was about to leave Saturday morning when my niece called to say that there was no time left at all.  Fortunately she and my brother, and the hospice nurse as well were at Mother's bedside when she died Saturday.

My Mom

Yesterday morning I received a call from the nursing home where my mother has been living for the past few years.  Though physically frail, Mom has been doing pretty well mentally, and we had a wonderful visit with her back in June.  Now, however, she is failing, the nurse tells me, and they don't expect her to bounce back the way she has in the past.  This is hard news, of course.  I need to visit her as soon as I can arrange it.

But meanwhile, I also want to keep up with my project to become better organized, and catch up with the entries I've missed. 

The Bears

Well, the bears made the news - this photo was made by a neighbor on our block, just a few doors away from our house.  Fortunately, the next sighting of the animals indicates that they were moving away from the inhabited areas and traveling westwards towards the woods.  Better for us, better for the bears.

Day Four - and more.

After I wrote yesterday's entry, I continued reading - the part on identifying one's purpose.  Steve's method, consulting emotional intelligence, was very effective.  But now I have to move from the theoretical to the practical, from broad purpose to concrete goals, and oddly, I haven't found any guidance on that.  Maybe it's very obvious to most folks - but not me, at least not now.  So, today has been the one step backwards day.  However, I've found some possible links, and will have a go at them tomorrow. 

Ever since I started this project, I've had troubling dreams each night.  Not really bad ones, but disturbing.  Strangely, this is probably a positive sign - it means I'm stirring things up.  An odd sort of encouragement. 

The more part: tonight the phone rang several times with neighbors calling to tell us that bears have been seen only a few houses away from us.  Seems there's a mother with three cubs roaming around.  It's the night that garbage goes out for the early morning pickup.  And it makes easy pickings for bears too, and other creatures. About a year ago our city sanitation department (and yes, the place I live in is categorized as a city - but keep in mind, a city with bears) informed us that we are not to use the standard sized garbage cans any more.  Too heavy I guess.  So we and most of our neighbors put garbage out now in plastic bags.  Happy skunks and raccoons, and now, bears.

Day Three

Yesterday I read "The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live?" - finally, something easy for me to work with, despite its gravity.  The core question was, "What should you live for?"  Pavlina says "It is important to make a global choice about how to live our lives, since this decision sets the context for everything else we do."  For me this choice is simple - it is one made long ago: Buddhism - of the Vajrayana variety - Dzogchen - that is my 'context.'  Now, the intention of this article was to invite the reader to investigate his or her own beliefs and choices, and most of the material in this series of articles has indeed given me a lot to think about.  This investigation, however, I completed many years ago.

I encountered Tibetan Buddhism in 1976 - became the student of a very good teacher.  It was not an easy path, but it was what I'd been looking for. I kept at it, did my best to fulfill the demands it made, but by the early '90's I was worn out.  It didn't help that I had a high-pressured computer job that required me even to sleep with a beeper under my pillow. I wanted both to rest and to explore other options.  So I stepped back from my teacher and from Buddhism for a couple of years.  The details of this really aren't important - what is, is the fact that somewhere about a year into this process, it became clear to me that Buddhism - the view of reality it expresses, not just written doctrine - had become more central to my mind and my being than anything else, than my name, my history, my sense of self.  That was clear and final - though almost inexpressible. 

So there's my answer.

The rest of the article - Pavlina's discovery and exploration of his own 'context,' was interesting and thought provoking.  But not something I needed to apply to my own life right now. 

The next piece in the series is about finding in this context an explicit and achievable purpose - I'm looking forward to reading it.

'Bye Little Mink

Several weeks ago Minky, our black cat, died, and it's still hard to talk about it.  She held on to life more than any pet I've ever had.  Twenty-two years old, she'd already had a good, long life.  Over the past year she had become thinner and thinner, had stopped grooming herself, and overall resembled a small moth-eaten rug.  Deaf but not blind, she could still tell by the scent alone when we were cooking chicken (her favorite) and would come to beg for some, and would eat a good portion if we gave it to her.  Of course we always did.  She was a strong-willed but sweet cat.  I miss her. 

Day Two

Yesterday was the first day of blogging about this experiment, and actually, the third day of following Steve Pavlina's voluminous material on self-discipline.  At present, this is like being in a great marsh at dusk - hard to get through and hard to distinguish where I am. 

Yesterday I deleted all the games from my PC.  I only had the standard ones that come with Windows, but I played them a lot, especially when I felt too tired to do anything else.  A time-waster.  Today I find myself moving the cursor toward where the game icons were,  thinking of playing a game of solitaire, but now there's nothing there.

I should say that I don't feel that self-discipline means becoming humorless and never playing.  In fact, PC games for me were never really simple fun - that's part of what was wrong with playing them, for me.  They were a distraction - they left me feeling both edgy and tired at once, and sometimes I compulsively played one game after another.  The more tired I felt the stronger the compulsion was.  In simple terms, I think I played games to avoid getting up and facing some task I didn't like.  Years ago, back before I retired, it was what happened at the end of the work day - I would be too tired to get up and deal with putting stuff away, leaving work, and starting my hour-long subway commute.  Well - no more games - not until they are just fun.  Another time-saver I hope.

Of more substance, I also explored more of Pavlina's site, and settled on an article on "The Meaning of Life".  Working with this material seems to involve, at the moment, stepping back - from self-discipline itself, which is simply a tool - to articles that might help me discern and define project(s) I could use the tool for.  So - the meaning of life. 

In this article Pavlina speaks of exploring one's beliefs about the nature of reality itself since these beliefs form what he calls the "context" that actually determines one's goals and projects.  I found a lot of insightful material there - but one point was unsettling. 

Do your current beliefs empower you to be your best, or do they doom you to live as a mere shadow of what you could be? Can you honestly say that you are doing your best or very close to it? Are you living congruently with your most deeply held beliefs? Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, how well do you practice them? Do you walk your talk?

Actions, not words, reveal beliefs. If you want to understand what you truly believe, observe your actions....

This is all fine - but then Pavlina makes an unexpected suggestion.  He doesn't recommend the obvious, changing your actions so that they become congruent with your beliefs.  Rather, "I say first get your beliefs in line with your actions and reach the point of being totally honest with yourself, doubts and all."  I was very uncomfortable with this apparent suggestion to abandon my beliefs (since my actions do such a poor job of manifesting them.)

Yes, my actions do reveal my real beliefs - and a comparison of the two is illuminating in the extreme.  The result of this comparison however, is an opening to discover tacit, unexpressed beliefs that have been determining my actions without even being recognized, and as I come to understand them better, I now can choose between these and my more conscious beliefs. 

Getting Started

Early this week I googled "self-discipline" and I found Steve Pavlina's blog series on this topic.  I read the first entry and got pretty enthusiastic about his approach.  Before reading much more, I got sidetracked to another of his topics, Polyphasic sleep, which is perhaps one of his longest series.  He describes in it his experiment with substantially reducing the amount of sleep he required by taking comparatively brief naps every few hours.  What struck me was Steve's attitude of try-anything open-mindedness. 

From there I got involved in trying to apply his concepts to my own life.  Suffice it to say that I'm still enthusiastic, and, according to Marlene this is having a pretty positive effect on what I'm getting done.  However, I've also gotten all tangled up in this mass of new ideas.  How do I apply all of this to myself?  I decided that as a first step, I'll write at least one blog entry each day chronicling my progress, or lack of progress.  So - here's todays' entry - the first one anyhow.

Geese

It's the time of year when the Canada geese start to appear here in their southerly migration - that's the simple version.  But what they actually do here seems more complex.  This morning I was out to have a headlight repaired in my car, and when I arrived back home, I heard geese calling.  I saw them - just a few of them - almost directly overhead, flying pretty much due west. 

An hour later I heard more geese and went outside - this time there were more - two orderly V's - flying east.  Their formation shifted languidly from V's to a W, then Y, and back again, thirty or forty birds this time.  I believe what they're doing is settling down for the next few weeks in various local ponds and creeks to feed and fatten themselves up for their ultimate long journey south.  They'll be everywhere for a month or so then suddenly, gone.

Fall 2007

Here the trees are just beginning to turn, although I know that the fall colors are at their peak farther north.  When the leaves are gone, we'll be able to see more of the new buildings that have been going up all summer in the development behind us.  I'm not looking forward to that - in part because it's a reminder of changes that I didn't expect (how foolish of me.)  When I moved here I loved the rural quality of the area - but that's disappearing.  One of the prettiest local lakes has been purchased by some corporation that is going to build a gated community around it.  I find this troubling for many reasons - not the least is the sense that eventually I too will be one of those against whom this community's gate will be locked.      

On a totally different tack, I was thinking about one of my recent purchases.  I bought a meter-stick.  We'd been watching some science program, and someone waved one of these around - it looked kind of neat, and in the spirit of staying abreast of trends, I ordered one online.  So - this morning I was thinking of meter-sticks and yard-sticks: how resonant the latter, familiar, word is, and how empty the former.  A very small reminder of how meaning accumulates.