Bragging Rights

Actually, bragging wrongs.

It used to be - I mean way back in the middle of the last century - that we understood bragging was wrong.  I think as kids we corrected each other snidely if we did it.  Maybe kids still do, until they get on social networks and/or get smart phones.  I blame all that, the internet, camera phones, digital cameras, and of course, the general breakdown of civilization.

Used to be, if you had some triumph, you ran home and told your mother about it.  If she did something special, like grow an heirloom tomato, such as above - which I bought at the store - she might take it over to a neighbor to see, but not if that neighbor's tomatoes weren't bearing.  It might make her feel bad.  See what I mean?

Similarly, the incredible fellowship you won, your new fur coat, the gourmet meals you cook every day, which I admit are beautiful, your many vacations - Wun used to not brag about accomplishments and privileges to the whole wide world.  After all.  Some people you know can't travel because they're old or sick or have no money, or all of those.  Back when, you didn't ask people in those categories to come and watch your slides, or even look through a little album you might take to work, though I never knew anyone who did that, actually.  No. People used their discretion.  Perhaps Wun pinned a postcard of Paris inside her pod.  That's all.

Do I really have to go on with this, or do you want to go to your Facebook and see who's sending photos from Rome before they go on to Greece?  See pictures of a fabulous meal at a four-star restaurant you could never afford?  Okay, I'll concede this - it gives us all a chance to work on our natural envy.  As if we needed more such opportunities.

What is needed, probably, is that everyone go to that new Google attempt at a social network, which I understand allows you to separate your friends into various circles.  Put me in the one that says Can't Travel, Can't Afford Fine Restaurants.  Yes.  Put your mother and daughter in the other one that says Always Happy for my Good Fortune.  Maybe your sister too, maybe not.  I leave that to you.

Meanwhile, you can always "hide" an offender on Facebook, click on the x top right of one of their posts.  They won't even know it.  You can unhide them, too.  I managed to do that, though I couldn't tell you how.  And if one of those hidden world travelers asks if you saw his pictures of Italy, you can say wonderingly, "No - I don't always check my facebook like I should."  Which is probably true. 

An unfinished post

I want to recommend something today - a day of kindness. 

When we are very ill, even just a little ill, we can be taken by the illness.  That is, our minds can be taken over, especially by pain.  Maybe that's inevitable when we are actually dying, but if you were dying you wouldn't be reading this.  Whether the illness is of the mind, a dark landscape, a scatter of thoughts going off like pops of fire in a combat zone, or of the body, a severe physical pain, a map of aches, the mind can get very involved with this being in pain. So we are self-involved. An ordinary person, which is to say a somewhat narcissistic individual, can fall into a well of self, as if you were the last one alive. 

I have for some time had a little book in my bathroom that is all about kindness. On the cover is the face of a lovely monk smiling at me.  So it's like a small, humble poster there, reminding me. One of the things the book recommends is vowing to be kind for one day.  Kind to everyone and everything.  Keeping in mind the question, Am I being kind right now?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And here I just wore out.  These days I do that, just feel a topic go dry.  Usually I just go away, do something else.  When I come back, maybe it looks good and I finish it.  Maybe I erase it or file it as a draft. But today I'll just stop here.  If anyone does this, I'd enjoy hearing how it went. 

A Day of Kindness

Now I am reading a book called Awakening Kindness:  Finding Joy Through Compassion for Others, by Nawang Kechong.  In the exercises at the end, he suggests living a day devoted to  kindness, and describes the many ways we can be kind.  Last night I decided to adopt this idea today.

There aren't many of us awake around here this Monday morning - Natasha and me.  It is mostly easy and natural to be kind to her; she wants a cuddle first thing when I get up.  She wants her canned food when my cellphone alarm goes off at 8:00 a.m. and I take my Neoral.  Sometimes she doesn't recognize kindness, of course, as when we give her her two daily doses of liquid antibiotic.  She doesn't even know that her baseline exam at the Vet's cost $125, nor could a cat understand the concept of money.


After the cuddle, the first kind thing I did was put the teakettle on and get the water hot to defrost the birdbath.  I haven't seen any creatures use it yet, but I have faith.  I like being kind to the birds, especially now that it's been so cold and wet, the remaining berries covered with snow.  Then I noticed myself throwing out Tashi's water from last night to give her fresh, and a little thought crept into my mind, This is not kind to the earth. That water can be put into the little watering can for the indoor plants.  

Gratitude to the earth preoccupied me as I reheated some fried potatoes we'd brought home from a restaurant, imagining the human hands that planted these, or ran the machines that planted and harvested, the semi that transported them here, the roads it ran on. . . . I thought it might not be hard to get one of those sacks they sell now to plant potatoes in, maybe that would be kinder, take less resources.  Wishful thinking; we don't have a full day of sun except in the front yard.  The sack would look peculiar out on the lawn.  I'm working on this.


But the most striking thing was realizing kindness toward myself.  How many little things I want to do, need to do to have a more peaceful life, like get my new purse calendar filled in.  Do my small finances for the month.  Put a second coat of nail polish on, to keep my fingernails from breaking and peeling (effect of the immunosuppressants, I guess).   Get a second pair of rubber gloves on the grocery list, to protect my fingertips from cracking.  All things that mitigate against having any grand aspirations.  


I also had thoughts about how following impulse is often really not so kind, if it means these other things don't get done and ba-a-ad karma ensues.  Nevertheless, I know I'll make time for a game now and then of Color Junction.  A game or two between tasks, not thirty.  Hey, it relaxes me from all this discursive thinking.