Right awareness

The mind is the first and foremost front in the war of getting what you want.

Many rightly link thoughts to words, words to actions, actions to habit, habit to character, and character to outcomes. And many rightly say change what you can and tolerate or transmute what you can’t.

We exercise utmost control in our thoughts, as nowhere else, and can there gird ourselves against external struggle and adversity, and make our minds the seedbed of serenity and success. Yet more often than not the mental palace is a house divide unto it self: it teems with fear and self-doubt, and small challenges and disappointments create turmoil.

One way to change your thoughts is to strive to cast adversity as opportunity. Take traffic. Traffic sucks. Traffic delays, disturbs, wastes, encroaches on our arrow-focused, little efforts. Traffic makes us feel like a pawn, one among multitudes of pawns. Where are all these drones, ourselves included, off to anyway? Traffic incites self-deprecating and second-guessing, causes us to regret snoozing, shower languishing, or coffee lingering, because if only we'd arisen at cockscrow, we'd damn well be there by now! Traffic sucks you from positive and productive thinking into a pit of distraction, frustration, anxiety despair.

While we may avoid traffic, once we're in traffic, it's too late. All we can manage is our mental response. There, we are master. Each time you resist the suck, you further fortify your mental palace into a mental fortress.

With right awareness, you can convert mistakes and failure into challenge and success. The character Somni-456 talks about this in David Mitchell's time-and-space-spanning novel Cloud Atlas. (For context, a sony is a computer. Go is a strategic game like chess.)

Well, Hae-Joo probed, what did I do to relax?
I play Go against my sony, I said.
“To relax?” he responded, incredulous. “Who wins, you or the sony?”
The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve?
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
I said, If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

Cast adversity as opportunity to create solace inside from inside, and you will find it in pursuits outside.

Not lost

Thus we fling into successive siftings:
Tremulous on the edge
Gleaning, leaning, teetering,
Kissed by the wind,
Of a sudden, all in,
Down and bouncing down,
Among slag and slough,
Cornice and crevasse,
The paths of ancients,
Seeking, who knows,
Earth, place, rare arete.

And when the day is done our wayward pebble,
Adopts sun as tutor and softly settles,
With alike bunch in a friendly groove,
Only to, when prompted, launch anew!

When will our loose-footed friend,
Immensity's implacable pull forefend,
And giving up the day declare,

Advent to a single-state affair?

--
And for a similar tale, see this account of the The 25-Year Riverine Journey of a Wooden Boulder Carved out of a Felled 200-Year-Old Oak Tree.

Meeting house meditation

Quietly, for a time, I replace,

My striving ego with a state of grace,

Shuffle my insecurity, doubt, and fear,

And place them on a burning bier,

And in the emptiness descry,

The luminosity of an open sky. 

Challenge yourself

To entertain yourself, to impress yourself, to daily go "dude, you're awesome," to attain equipoise, to stay focused, to discover the taproot, to respect others, to respect life, to minimalize, to go for goals, to accept the blows of the hammer, to take lightly, to be the foam of the wave, to not despair, see humor in it all, to learn, to express, to well rest, to dance with values, to know thyself, to be compassionate, to take responsibility, to say no, to shut doors, to dance, to humiliate yourself, to make commitments, to embark, to settle in, to explore landscapes of long-term love, to wing it, to plan and build machines and schedule and budget and spreadsheet, to push yourself and others, to seek those that push you, to seek art in the mundane, to hold yourself well, to sleep well and don't regret waking, to get specific:

To jump off decrepit pier-posts into Lake Michigan, to dance the twist with Early Clover and Westport's crazed jet set at the Levitt Pavilion, to say "hey, I'm Brad".

To write more than read, percuss more than tap toes to others' grooves, speak more than be spoken to, to debate freely and fearlessly, to call out cabbies' racism, to stop uttering jejune curses—the crasset and banalest of language—to cease immoderate drinking—another poison and crutch—to trust, to share, to laugh, to find faith in the non-cost-benefit-calculating, non-optimizing, non-indecisive, much-knowing decision-making apparatus of the body, to bury past blunders and future doubts with current successes.

To suspend sinking the self into endless abysses of meta-meta-meta-... analysis and just be and do. To avoid the self-deprecating self-shaming and self-doubting words, phrases, and caveats that infiltrate thoughts and words, to banish shame from joy, to cease self destruction, to take breaks, to bypass desires to attain goals, to be your biggest critic and your biggest fan.

To love yourself the only way: frankly, unflinchingly, unjudgingly, and transparently in consideration of all you are, were, and will be and accept and then just be.

India, observations

Delhi-Belly on day two (paratha alley beat me)...

A killer dinner combo: brain masala + liver and kidney masala with potato paratha at Delhi's premier non-veg eatery, Karim’s...

Religious mosaics: visiting the holy places and talking with the disciples of the following faiths: Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh. My favorites were a flamboyant Jain temple in Kolkata and of course the Bahai Lotus in Delhi...

Greeting the New Year in the Nepali foothills of the Himalayas. The topography and flora changed constantly, local people swarmed about, and we stayed in “tea houses” – rudimentary hostels. It snowed a good three or four inches at the highest point – approximately 10,000 ft. And the mountains almost killed us...

Offering some roasted chestnuts to a random guy on the street, who reacts with rage and repulsion. Grossly assuming poverty and paternalism...

Getting stuck by a national strike in the middle-of-bumble Nepal due to political instability, thereby forming the bus trip from Pokara to the Kakarbhitta on the border with India: 8 hours from Pokara + 2 hours in Kathmandu bus park + 13 hours ride + 5 hours in limbo in a rinky-dink town through which no tourist had ever passed ever + 4 hours ride to Kakarbhitta , India + a carnivalesque evening crossing having to rouse border officials and avoid a parade of hasslers peddlers and touts + 1 hour bus ride to Siliguri, India ... pause... then, after a night’s rest, the 3 hours into the hills to Darjeeling. The destination merited the trip. I went to Kolkata by AC2-class train ticket, which I made by just a few minutes after sprinting slapdash out of the mountains (one of many very close-call transit transitions)...

Extremes of wealth distribution and omnipresent, relentless, and unassailable poverty...

Meeting a wild-talking, whiskey-drinking entrepreneur on the train. His Indian academic crew writes term papers and dissertations for students in Europe and the Americas...

Going to Kipling's Kim's school in Lucknow, or one enough like it. Roaming around the deserted complex...

Taking 12-15 hour overnight train's “sleeper” cars between Delhi and Varanasi and Varanasi and Lucknow. This ordering was an accident of scheduling; sleeper was the only available class and almost impossible to get nonetheless. Sleeper-class cars are not as romantic as Rudyard Kipling would have us believe. For all intents and purposes, they are open to the air. In winter in Uttar Pradesh at night the temp averages about 45 degrees F . In these trains, poorly-made and ill-fitted windows and shutters and doors don’t close or people don't close them. Christine and I only had one sleeping bag between us, which I allowed her to use. This left me shivering in the fetal position on my dirty bunk with the unmitigated commotion of the train and people pressing in from all sides, coughing up and spitting on the floor. This was our moving hotel, for we had elected to travel at night for our first three nights instead of book a room. I found my limits of energy and sanity, but felt my "suffering" mitigated by the people I shared the train car with: the tiny girl walking on bare feet, without pants, crying; the sick; people shitting in fields along the train track in the wan dawn. Later, I hired a bunk in an insulated, clean, middle-class car with bed linen the trip between Darjelling and Kokata. I met upper-middle class, sociable, generous people. I slept wonderfully, and didn’t have to chain my bag to my belt. Still, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

No crisis in an Iceland river

Allow me to be

I'm as boring as a book on tape,
As melancholy as a song,
As alluring as a nape,
As illicit as a bong.
I'm as bright as the night,
As petty as neighbors,
As pure as off-white,
As binding as favors.
I'm as open as a window,
As astir as passion,
As pampered as snow,
As free as sin.
I'm as one as Pangaea,
As holy as Aquinas,
As dissolute as Krishna,
As meretricious as highness.
I'm this-all and more,
As fundamental as a quark,
As latent as a question mark,
As welcoming as a paramour.

Resolution: write

My New Year's resolution is to write more or rather to write. Here are a few ideas that have been floating around my head or just in this moment came to me:

Icelandic arcs: A story about Iceland and its people; the financial crisis; tourism boom; and society's shifting landscape. I'd approach these ambitious topics through a profile of Hadda and Haurkur, who own and operate Hrifunes Guesthouse and Iceland Photo Tours. I stayed with H&H at their guesthouse in November. I want to explore the tension between hard work and gambling: how H&H worked to build things, and in contrast how hot shot bankers profiteered from gambles that eventually landed the 300,000 Icelanders with billions in debt. The premise is that individuals, including those that head up institutions (i.e. banks, governments) operate by principles. Haurkur and Hadda reflect good principles; many bankers reflect bad ones. Most clearly, the latter ended up living large on borrowed money and dropping their debts on the likes of Haurkur and Hadda. However, now H&H are thriving on the unexpected result of the speculative investing: the weaker krone has precipitated a tourism boom that is reshaping Iceland's many contours.

Dying migrations: A ruminative encyclopedia of migration with a focus on extinct, perishing, hampered, and mutated migrations (are there any?). The unit of analysis here is the migration itself, the periodic, ritual journey of procreation and renewal. I'd build up from the journeyers to the journey, synthesize across journeys, and then delve into dying migrations. I'd interrogate first, what is the purpose migrations? Who journeys and why? What is the salmon's motive, the goose's, the whale's, the antelope's? Are there human migrations? Why? I'd close with philosophical thoughts, untethered to great thinkers, on the loss and mutability of things. 

Dormant connections. In the mid- to late-1900s, the University of Pennsylvania partnered with a technical university in Shiraz, Iran called Pahlavi University, since renamed Shiraz. Penn worked extensively with Pahlavi to redesign the university in the American model. Students and teachers shuttled back and forth. Professors collaborated. Pahlavi awarded President of Penn, Gayord Harnwell, an honorary degree for his work. Then the Islamic Revolution happened, ended the collaboration, dug a nigh-uncrossed chasm between the universities and the countries. I'd like to explore the dormant connections and the potential for reconciliation in the political dynamics. I don't want to harken back to a better era. The earlier intercourse rested on imperial, autocratic, and unequal foundations. The Penn-Iran connection betrays a similar inequality of flow, an unevenness, elements of paternalism and imperialism. It was beautiful but it was imperfect and perhaps it fed the discontent that drove the revolution. Nonetheless, I'd like tot talk about the relationship, current political events, and prospects for reviving the lost relationship between Shiraz and Penn and Iran and the US.

Notes to self

Sometimes I think "Everyone admires what in me I don't think highly of" referring to my higher education, my work, and my travels. But when I said something of this to my Dad, he said, "Society doesn't care about you," and a little later, "You're not different than anybody else."

My dad's observations light up how in overfocusing on myself I end up in the absurd. There is no society. Even if there were, it wouldn't give a damn about me. Nobody cares. My friends and family care but only in that they want the best for me. And if I please one person, it ought to be me; the rest will follow.

My dad pointed out how little I've committed to anything in my life. Which is too true. I'm a dabbler, a dilettante, a tourist of trades and travels. I loathe this about myself.

I've sunk years into toil that I despise. Is this my idea of how to live a life? Then again, whose idea is it? My parent's? Well, yeah, there's some of that. They convinced me to stay the course when I strayed from economics and "wanted to read more Shakespeare." Yet here I am again.

I guess I would retrace my steps, for the most part, not knowing where other paths might have swept me off to. I just wish I'd built up all the while some reserve storehouse of skills and knowledge that I respect. I'm very much an asshole to myself, but partly because I've let myself down so.

I must also laugh and say to myself, "You goof, you self-immolating, ass-backwards, self-befuddling son of fortune. How now this gloomy navel gazing when sun is for basking, seas are for soaking, soulful souls are for loving? Seriously, why so serious? Late, inherited Christian crisis mentality has you by the cobblers."

"Get over yourself. Looking within has only confused you; time to turn outward. Record, depict, shape, impact. Be as a child, new to the world. Revel in its strangeness. Look to others. Cast your net outward and find solace in action."

"Make a break. Start. Start small. Just do it. Things have a way of carrying you away, which is what you want and need to get back your self respect."

Technological travails

Life has taken a sharp turn for the worse. I've been in a Stop n' Shop for about 2 hours. Ideally I'd never enter a Stop n' Shop or a Walmart or a McDonalds, among other omnipresent, obtrusive centers of commerce and diabetes. Stop n' Shop isn't even all that bad; it's more a matter of principle.

Nonetheless, I ended up here. What happened is this: I screwed up synching my iPhone with iTunes and, since I don't have wifi at my apartment, I had to venture forth to restore the phone's operating system. Stop n' Shop boasts wifi internet and Starbucks and cookies so here we are.

Then when the restore was on the cusp of completion, the computer lowed an emergency low battery distress signal and summarily died. Devastation! I had to restore the blood sucker and re-synch all of everything and I'm mid process. My life resides on that devilish device.

All of this has served to remind me why I don't have wifi in the apartment in the first place: technology--at least high technology--does not by and large make my life easier, let alone better.

It does, but it doesn't. I must, as always, blame myself first and foremost. I am me. And I am not an adept, precise, or meticulous problem solver when it comes to technological complexity. I'm all thumbs. My neurons are wearing oven mitts.

I believe this is because I harbor a more romantic, synthetic, gestalt-based sensibility. I mean, I want things to work and be beautiful. I want beauty to surge muse-beckoned out of my pure and unhindered soul. Things should work, should they not? I'm no concrete, technological, engineering, analytical fixer. I can't fix a chicken sandwich let alone a faulty circuit or corroded whatsit. Thus, rather than master my technology my technology masters me.

This may be a tolerable state of affairs. It depends on what I'm aiming to optimize for: poetry, motorcycle maintenance, financial analytics, journalism, funk music, teaching, child rearing. What do I want, and what do I want to do, and what do I want to do well?

I need to iron out the factors in production here, because it's not like understanding the technical, analytical relationship between factors in a poetic form inhibits poetic expression. Perhaps the dichotomy is false and quality inheres in a fusion. Let's see if unstructured intuitive creativity will solve this.
***

PS I hate how Facebook pushes its push notifications and friend lookup and other crappy crap. It's basely procreative but annoying nonetheless. And YouTube commercials now induce in me a rage that's rapidly overwhelming any pleasure I get from the site's music, comedy, Ted Talks and junk. And what about the latest iTuneses? Insidious monstrosities that make me want to commit technical seppuku. Someone save me from these technology travails