Saturday, August 30, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
Weekly Quotations Part 30
The Mindfulness Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher K Germer
Forgiveness is essential in life because we make mistakes
all the time. (156)
Hatred corrodes the vessel in which it’s stored. (161)
Negative feelings toward others tend to separate us from
ourselves and from others—they trigger aversion. (161)
There are traditionally six categories of people with whom
we train ourselves in the art of loving-kindness. The trick is to start with an easy target,
reinforce the loving-kindness habit, and work up from there.
- Self—Your personal identity, usually located within the skin.
- Benefactor—Someone who makes you consistently smile, such as a mentor, a child, a spiritual guide, a pet, or a piece of nature.
- Friend—A supportive person toward whom you feel trust and gratitude and have mostly positive feelings.
- Neutral—Any living being whom you don’t know and therefore neither like nor dislike.
- Difficult—Someone who has caused you pain, or toward whom you have negative feelings.
- Groups—Any group of living beings, for example, everybody listed above, everyone in your home, workplace, or city. (167-168)
The most natural time to practice loving-kindness toward others is when you’re genuinely happy—when
you have loving energy to spare. It’s
easy to wish happiness for others when we’re happy. (180)
To one who stands outside the Christian faith, it is utterly
astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of
omniscience. (62)
The truth is . . . the conflict between religion and science
is unavoidable. The success of science
often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious
dogma always comes at the expense of
science. (63)
The core of science is not controlled experiment or
mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledged a basic feature of
human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either
engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one
isn’t. Religion is the one area of our
lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity
applies. (64-65)
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a
mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still
holds immense prestige in our society.
Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble
to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain
about. It is telling that this aura of
nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. (67-68)
Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe
exists. (74)
The past. It’s like
it has nowhere to go. It’s like that
[May] pole. We’re all tied to it, we all
keep walking around and around. Or else
it’s like the earth—the earth spinning, but also how it builds up, a layer at a
time. It’s what we bury. What we succeed in not thinking about, so
long as we think it’s gone. But it isn’t
gone. It’s never really gone. And then it just bubbles up, like the tar
pits, or like pus in a zit. (197)
Outside the bar . . .
night was coming on like a hopeless, drunken come-on, tequila on its
breath, red neon signs and, outside the shops, strings of colored Christmas
lights hung fr)om the eaves like the sad close-lipped smiles of boys who would
lure you in with their loneliness, that melancholia you’d try and try to
fix. (211)
How easy it was . . .
to take oneself out of the picture.
(221)
The light at the end of the tunnel . . . on never thought
it’d be red. At the beginning of the
tunnel, maybe, but at the end, one presumed, the light would be white, bluish
white, if it had any hue at all. Red
wasn’t transcendence, but return. Red
was home. It was a stove and a fireplace,
a cup of something warm to wrap one’s hands around. (229)
Her waking dream would be lucid and the magic in her life,
real. (266)
Quoting Pascal Khoo Thwe:
People who had been silent for twenty-six years now wanted to shout, or
at least endlessly to debate. (61)
Once the waters of a revolution start flowing, you can’t
push them back forever. . . . (118)
Quoting Ma Thanegi:
With the exception of very few I would like to hit poets who are writing
poetry, usually very bad, about doing this and doing that . . . and reading
them aloud. . . . (134)
Every nation is defined by the holidays it marks; it is the
way the story of the nation punctuates the passage of time. (146)
Quoting Ann Pasternak Slater: [M]ost of us were neither laid back nor
laid. (193)
Her notebooks became the ground where her conflicted anger
and divided intellect could do battle on the page. (6)
Life is walking tiptoe over land mines. We never know what’s coming and, . . . we
don’t have a good grip on what’s behind us either. But we sure as hell can spin a story about it
and break our brains trying to get it right.
(13)
Nonexistent, impossible, imaginary objects are in our
thoughts all the time, but in art they move from the inside to the outside,
words and images cross the border. (26)
There are many stories and as many reasons for leaving the
feminine behind and adopting the masculine, or dropping either one for the
other, as was convenient. (33)
What interested me were perceptions and their mutability,
the fact that we mostly see what we expect to see. (33)
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Poll Request: WIP Sample (Rough Draft)
I don’t which of us noticed first but every time he
was on the screen, all I could see was Sam.
The same arching eyebrows and plump lips. The same way his wavy hair sort of flopped
over his eyes. The eyes were different
though. Sam’s were grey but this actor’s
were brown. Still, I caught my breath
every time his character was back on screen, only realizing that I was holding
it when he was on the screen for more than a few moments.
Just as I was trying to convince myself it was my
imagination, Gelsey leaned over and said, “OMG, Linz. He looks like Sam.”
So it wasn’t just me.
She saw it too. And then she
sighed, exaggerating the exhalation. You
know, how those fangirls do when they are oohing and ahhing over someone. The rest of the movie, I had to sit there as
she giggled and gushed whenever the pseudo-Sam showed up on screen. I just
followed along because that’s what we did.
We were friends, best friends, and this was our last
movie together before school started. It
was the end of summer and we’d be going to school together for the first time
since we were kids. It was the end of
what was supposed to be The Best Summer Ever.
But it was a summer where things changed for me, for us, and she didn’t
even know. Gelsey just sighed and
giggled while I played along and all I could think about was how Sam hadn’t
emailed me or anything. Not that I
should have cared but I did care. I cared and I cared enough not to let my best
friend know what I was thinking about.
Instead, I leaned in and giggled and, when the movie credits ended, the
theater lights came up, I sighed in sync with her.
And we giggled together again, like old times, like we
did when the summer was starting and everything was different.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Wrote a Blog Post Because I Thought I Should Share (and Respond)
It’s funny, the things that will spark conversation. For instance, Justin Schwamm writes a
fascinating blog about his teaching experience where he often gets
philosophical. Maybe my life experience
has little-to-nothing to do with his Latin Teacher experience; nonetheless, it’s
surprising how often his insights leave me feeling reflective.
For instance, this
post in which he writes about what is mine
and not mine and should.
The other day, I wrote a reply to an email from Erin. You see, we’ve been working our way through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain together
and, the other day, she shared a drawing she did that was not one of the
exercises. I was overdue with some of
the exercises myself, having fallen a bit behind. Maybe I was feeling guilty for not making
time to do something I am honestly enjoying doing because, when Erin emailed me
and said “I know this isn’t one of the exercises yet but I did this,” I wrote
back:
This is what you should
be doing.
Now, I meant this to be encouraging, to suggest that
sometimes an exercise will feel a bit uninspired or time won’t allow for more
than a few minutes of quick sketching and, on those days, it’s okay to draw something
else. But that isn’t what I said, is
it? Instead, I had inserted this
judgmental and implicit word:
should.
Now, maybe I should try to keep up with Erin. And maybe I should make time for
drawing. But who am I to tell her what
she should
do? I had clearly overstepped a
boundary from mine to not mine, as Justin writes in his
blog. I was projecting my own should onto her.
So I corrected myself in another email, apologizing for my
faux pas. Not that she even noticed or
cared. She’s gracious like that. But I needed to own what I wrote even if I
didn’t mean quite like that, because it is not for me to tell her or anyone else
what they should do or how they should live their lives. Half the time I’m resisting my own burden of should.
Which reminded me of a quote from an episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie Bradshaw is thinking about “the
S-word”:
Carrie voice-over: After Miranda used the S-word twice, I wondered if “should” was another disease plaguing women. Did we want babies and perfect honeymoons? Or did we think we should have babies and perfect honeymoons? How do we separate what we could do from what we should do? And here’s an alarming thought. It’s not just peer pressure. It seems to be coming from within. Why are we should-ing all over ourselves? (Season 6, Episode 15, “Catch-38”)
"Why are we should-ing all over ourselves?" I have a theory about why I should all over myself. I too often weigh myself down with what I should be doing (and, by association, should not be doing) when I don’t make
the time to know my why, which is
something else Justin’s been exploring in his blog. When I know why I should be doing
something, I remove the guilt and blame from my action and find myself doing
something because it is a choice. More
than that, it is a choice rooted in a personal integrity that has nothing to do
with an external should but is
driven by an internal want, a desire
that is connected with who I
am.
I’m going to try to remember this, to catch myself when I am
thinking/saying should, whether
about myself or others. When I’m should-ing on myself, I’ll ask myself why.
And if I’m should-ing on
someone else, I’ll just let it go. After
all, I don’t like it when I should
all over myself so I think it’s safe to say I shouldn’t do it all over someone else.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Weekly Update: A Good Week That Got Better and Better
Stress free dog's life |
Relief at last.
On Monday I went to have an MRI and mammogram and, on
Thursday, with the MRI results in hand, the orthopedist said I should have a
cortisone shot, which would relieve the pressure, reduce the pain, etc. I was warned that the next day or two could
prove to be uncomfortable. Fair enough. But if I could hope for relief by Sunday then
two more days of pain was nothing to concern myself over. The pain never returned. Once I had the shot,
it simply diminished slowly, ebbing and flowing but mostly ebbing.
Can you imagine my
joy, waking up Friday morning without a limp? It returned but only slightly. And Saturday, when Rob had a day-long gig, I
was able to take the dogs out into the back yard with only the slightest bit of
difficulty. I’m so close to back to
normal, I wish I’d had the shot sooner.
But I know that this is not a solution, that using cortisone is a quick
fix that comes with a cost. So I’m
committed to continuing with the physical therapy exercises, building on them
gradually over the rest of the year with hopes that by the year’s end I’ll be
back to exercising fully.
Shira's gifts. One is on back order. Any day now. |
Fully but with limitations.
In the coming weeks, I’ll
describe some of the modifications I’ll be making to keep up with the exercise
regimen I had been doing which was helping me to lose weight. Fingers crossed, I can get back on track and
back to losing weight. I won’t lie: I worry that by holding myself back I won’t
see any results. But I’d rather hold
myself back than be in pain. The
pressure to lose weight is increased, of course, because less weight means less
stress on my joints and I must limit the stress on my joints whatever else I
can do.
I did not gain or
lose weight this week.
Our first pizza choice was super crowded so we were looking for an alternate pizza place. |
You would think that my being pain free would be the
highlight of the week but it wasn’t.
Nope. I wrote all about what made
my week extra special in this blog post. And we
had a great time. Afterwards, she said
something about how nice it was to be able to talk, something we are unable to
do when we all get together. I have been
feeling I need more one-on-one time with my children and what Shira said
confirmed what I’ve been sensing. My
children and I need time together, to just be the two of us. It gets harder as
they get older, however. Joe and I have
been talking about the two of us going out for lunch or something as soon as my
knee is better. Not quite there yet but I’m getting there. So any day now, me and my son will have some
time with just the two of us.
It’s hard to believe that one week from today I’ll be
writing my end of month post. How is it
possible that August is almost behind us?
The rest of this week promises to be good. I’ll do my prescribed exercises. I’ll read and write and plan.
By the end of the week I’ll be free to walk on my own two
feet. Oh boy!
Oh boy! |
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