Need Demotivated? I Can Help You

Yes, you read that right.  I think it's time for Grandma to share some of her own tips for constantly demotivating herself.  Not sure how funny this is going to be, though I started with an idea of parodying yet another of those about 8,790,000 online articles about how to get yourself to do something you ought to do when everything in you cries out No! Or at least, most of you does, and hey, it's July.

But what about demotivating yourself?  A mere 59,000 entries about something all of us do most every day.  You can see this is a field crying for more content.  Meanwhile, exploring this got to be fun right away.  I took the quiz on demotivate.com, whose motto is, "If you're happy and you know it, find another site."  Their other motto is,

 Life sucks, give up.  

The quiz told me I am ~

On your way to true demotivation You are headed on the right path, just pick up a few bottles of vodka, wait til your dog dies and you will begin to finally feel how worthless your existence really is!

It's interesting to a demotivator to look up images for "Life sucks."  On one hand, you quickly get sidetracked into things like Cheezburger, which collects "epic fails," the best of which involve trucks whose drivers were probably both stoned and working above their pay grade.

At least half of what comes up on Google about demotivation is trying to motivate you in a sickening sweet way.  Now, I don't blame the people who make those posters, and sometimes put them on Facebook.  I know lovely people who do that now and then.  They are just trying to feel better.  I blame the society for making us all want to BE SOMEONE, and telling us that you can do anything if you try.  Especially when it tells you you can feel better if you try.

(Parenthetically, you really can't make yourself feel better, take it from an expert.  What you feel, you feel, including long bad moods that are profoundly karmic in nature.  But you're not allowed to be depressed and listless, are you?  It makes your friends nervous.  Actually, moods - energies - are catching, that's been studied, too. It feels good to be around a hypomanic, for a while.  Same is true of a depressive, except backwards.

[Even more parenthetically, I had the perhaps unique experience of being yelled at in a psych ward by another depressive for being depressing.  Specifically, I was playing Barb'ry Allen on the piano, which is not nearly so bad as cracking gum loudly and glaring at someone who is playing a sad song.  Psych wards are full of passive-aggressives, of course, the resident doctors being the worst.])  

Okay, where was I?
 
I wanted to be a little Zennish for a moment. I wanted to say that, while demotivation from outside can work, unfortunately, motivation from outside does. not. You can find learned articles about experiments that demonstrate that, if you are a scholarly type.  If not, allow me to summarize:  a sign on your wall, a post-it on your computer, people telling you to cheer up (don't you hate that?), these things do. not. work.  I know I am annoying you with my feeble cliched attempts to emphasize the point, so I'll make the point and run:  to be sustained in an effort, your motivation has to be internal.

Nor is internal motivation always good.  For example, you may have internalized at a very young age that if you were only good enough, your father would love you.  At least respect you.  And actually, painful life things like the delusion that you can make rejecting parents notice you often lead people to work hard and do good things.  Though mental constructions like that (if you only work hard enough . . . ) are often proven to be incorrect (are delusions, in Buddhist terms) with disastrous results.

And this post is long enough, so click here for a coffee mug that will help you stay pessimistic.  It's hard, with all these puppies and kitties on Facebook. Remember, they only enjoy life because they have little tiny brains not capable of hanging onto elaborate mental constructions.  Bless them.  Well, bless us all.

There's Self-love and then there's sssSelf-love

by Georgia O'Keefe

With my morning coffee the other day, I listened to an NPR bit on Alzheimer's disease.  I found myself thinking about how "personality" or what we call in Zen "the self" and I call sssself when I'm mad at mine, seems to reside mostly in the brain.  There is also temperament, of course, creating ethereal air people, focused fire people, comforting earth people.  That's kind of general.

But the ssself is particular.  It's all yours.  The one thing you own.  But a lot of it goes when memory goes.  Even before dementia, personality can be changed with a stroke or tumor.  My mother lost something like her work ethic with her first stroke at age 63, and became someone who mostly just wanted to sleep, smoke, and watch TV.   (Don't take retiring to do the things you love for granted.)  I know of other elders who got rude, mean, or downright violent with age-related dementia.

I was thinking about this when I noticed a blue sticky note I'd put on the newspaper the other day, so I looked at that page and, behold, here was the sssself again, this time in an article titled Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks.  I knew that - I've been unfriended for my realism, which translates to some people now and then as pessimism or cynicism.  But enough about me.  This is the paragraph I'd circled:

...Social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves.  This [sharing] is intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study...[that] showed it's so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.

Monetary rewards - that's money.  People will give up money to talk about themselves.  But you knew that.  We pay therapists of many descriptions to listen to us.

another Georgia O'Keefe, because I like it.

In the Zen tradition, Teachers are supported by gifts, though that is having to change - it's expensive to live in America.  You also sort of pay by sitting hour after hour meditating and following specific rituals in order to have the privilege of a moment with the Teacher that will be all about you and you alone.  It can happen that in this interview you say a few words and they may say a few words or say nothing, and ring the bell, meaning the interview is over.  That seems to mean whatever you said wasn't right, or worth responding to.  Something.  You have many hours until the next such interview to wonder about it.

Abrupt dismissal can hurt if you've been thinking deeply about your ssself and your desperate desire to have someone tell you you're enlightened; or asking for a kind of help no one can give you; or studying a koan and positive you're right this time.  These things can really disturb ssself, and maybe that's not bad; the project in Zen is to get less attached to that constructed batch of delusions, preferences and, oh yes, standing resentments - in brief, to your stories.

I'm not a scholar, but that's how I see Zen practice.  You sit quietly on a little raft and hope to drift far enough from the elaborate castle of self to see it. and therefore not be constantly traveling its hot and windy maze and playing with its treasures when you should be paying attention to the cat.  It sounds good, but does seem to take a lot of work.  No matter how bad Wun's self-esteem, we can be very attached to our delusions. 

And here I am, talking about myself again.  That's blogging for you.

The Zen of Not Sleeping Well

I can nap anywhere

Living without a conception of yourself - as it relates to your health and ability -

and also without ideas of how things ought to be, what you are entitled to

and not holding your plans and desires too tightly

and relinquishing your belief that you can, or could, control what happens to you (such as a good night's sleep)

but getting to notice that your stomach can't put away a certain family problem, and is reacting.  Strongly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
More thoughts this evening - I saw the same thing at the end of my mother's life - she clung more desperately to her delusions. About her husband, their history, herself, her kids, the bartender.  It's sad how much pain she caused, and how she suffered.

That's another thing to let go of, your anger when you see someone's stubborn delusions ripple out from them to cause pain to everyone caught in their wake.

So here is the thing - the search for enlightenment as bliss is the wrong emphasis.  We should be working and praying to get over our delusions.  To live in the world as it is.

(And in that world, sometimes you just don't sleep well, and that's a fact.) 

You are not who you think

This morning things are conspiring to make me realize more deeply the amazing luxury we live in here in the middle class in midwestern America just this moment.  Those conspiring things are the forthcoming book by Pema Chodron, which I have the really great good fortune to receive in galleys because I blog about these things; and the front page of the New York Times.  Specifically, an article about the problematic fact that now people in India and China want air conditioning, too. They want it more than they want TV.  I told Tom, "And not just in the bedroom - in the whole house, like us."

But don't kid yourself - in most of the world there are not that many "middle class" people.  There are mostly the handful of very very rich and the very poor who slave away in the mines and fields to bring us luxuries. I realize that those who can sit and read this blog are probably among the fortunate, like me.  You don't even want to know how many computers we own here.  We are middle-class Americans who grew up in a time when there was a larger, stronger middle-class.

Before you turn away from this post, thinking it is about, yawn, politics or economics, it is about to get intimate.  Actually, all those big-thinking things are intimate, in a sense.  Your air conditioning affects the whole world.  That's the problem discussed in the Times today.

But it is my personal life that's been nudging me to wake me up to reality these days.  Faithful Readers know about the majormajor problems of Tom's parents aging and not admitting to that fact.  Reading Pema last night, I felt like she had Tom's mother perfectly described.  To say, at 90, "I'm not old - I can drive - I'm perfectly capable of living in my house" is to insist on your delusion of invulnerability.  I'd guess this is connected to having spent your whole life refusing to acknowledge that you will not only age, you will die.

I have been rummaging around in Buddhist teachings for quite a few years now, and am familiar with the concept of ego.  This is not quite what we mean when we say someone is egotistic or has a big ego.  That refers to someone who thinks very highly of himself.  I say "himself" because most women seem to suffer from the opposite problem, low self-esteem.  How could we not when even Oprah, who ought to know better, has her nice plump zaftig body airbrushed into a size 12 on the cover of O?  (Here, I will restrain myself from posting a candid shot of her.)  In a competitive patriarchal society, most people feel inadequate, I'd guess. There isn't much room at the top.

So you see in the grocery store a big woman with huge (painful, beautiful) tattoos on her arms.  It is as if she is saying defiantly, "Hey, I might be stuck in a crap job, but I'm someone."

Well, you are someone.  But not who you think you are.  Who you think you are, that I-dentity you've worked up, that's a fixed idea, an ego.  Because we are really this cloud of constantly changing active systems.  A human being grows, matures, and then starts to age.  You could think of it as the decay of the carbon atoms we are composed of.  I like that word, composed.  Made.  Then de-composed.  I wish I could say that to my mother-in-law.  You're old, and getting older as we speak, I'd say with a smile, like I say it to myself after I try to take a flattering self-portrait.  Get used to it, I'd think - it's never going to go the other direction. But I won't tell her that - everyone's been telling her that - it doesn't work.

The Problem of Mother

My life is flowing past me like a bad movie back in the old days, when you went to a theater to see a movie with other people, and no one was texting.  And everyone just sat there, no matter how boring the movie was, how idiotically violent, just to see what the creature from the black lagoon looked like (not much).

My morning started with an obdurate computer. Windows open, the weather is freakishly warm again, and the computer doesn't like this natural world either, the moisture perhaps.  Waiting, waiting I realized the depth of my dependence on it.

There is a natural transition here - the word dependence - to The Problem of Mother.  Yesterday we spent two hours on phone conference with Mother, Good Sister, Gentle Eldercare Attorney, me and Eldest Brother, that's Tom, all trying to convince mother that she must go into assisted living.  She has dementia, has given lots and lots of money and stuff away to the evil scammers that pop up out of the dirt where there are supposed to be bodhissatvas.  Yet, all concerned were trying to reason with her.  She is very good at pretending she hears (oh no, no hearing aid) and deflecting decisions, has been doing it successfully all her life, and she's not about to make a major life decision now.  Someone is going to have to tell her, This is what we're going to do. But I can't convince them of that.  They want to believe she is reasonable.  So not only is she crazy, so are they. 

I feel that when it comes to crazy people, I know.  And it is a special dispensation. I have been crazy (a long time ago, quick to add), and in hospitals with other crazy people.  And somehow those experiences alienated me from the delusions shared by much of the world - or maybe that's what being crazy is, come to think of it - not sharing in the general delusion.

Why do these things with mothers make us all so insane? That is, why do we not see the reality before us, that Mother is very old (90) and not able to remember to lock the door or say no to people who try to take advantage of her.  (Dad is in skilled nursing, and likely to be in it the rest of his life; and not able to be part of decisions.)  Therefore, we must take over and move her somewhere where she is not in danger.  And it will be nice.

Well, just hone in on the question:  Why do we not see the reality before us?  Because it feels better not to.

As a kid you're pretty stuck with TV and games.  As an adult you can do that feeling better-denying reality-thing a lot of ways:  Ativan, gin, running breathlessly from one social event and one responsibility to another, hey, reading and blogging and painting - What's your favorite hedge against reality?  It's the curse of these much-larger-than-necessary human brains - they can be used to evade reality in a great many complicated ways.

Now, specifically onto mothers: all this took me back ten years to going through this kind of hell with my own mother and my siblings, who simply would not see the obvious truth of our mother's impairment, which included fecal incontinence.  Why?  I did not understand - I thought it was because they were drunk.  That was true, but something else is at work in these things.  And that is that the idea of a motherless world is quite frightening.  I found that out when my mother died.  Suddenly the sky was vacant.  My mother was not a kind, nurturing person.  Yet, or because of that, her death was a huge blow to me.  Maybe it's an energetic thing, that we are included in some sphere of home.  I doubt that it's all in your mind.

But it was and is a motherless world.  If you believe in or experience a caring God or universe, I'm sure it's easier to accept this.  Even so, the only thing you can count on is that the world changes constantly, you have nothing to stand on.  No security.  No assurance.

You can't count on anyone you love being here tomorrow, as much as I also hate to think it. You can't count on having the body or mind you have at this moment.  In fact, it is all a day older and more worn down today than it was yesterday, and this is true whether or not you're paying attention.  And the problem Mother is having is that she simply will not acknowledge the reality that she is old and forgetful and impaired.  My goodness.  Just like the rest of America, which was explored by a man looking for the fountain of youth.

Many spiritual people talk about a state of enlightenment in which we just dance with the flow, in which we have a quiet, consistent joy all the time.  If I find out where that state is located, I'll let you know. I think it has to do with understanding that nobody else is enlightened, either.

Meanwhile, I was struck with this lovely white-seeding grass (not photofixed).

We can still be crazy

How could I resist the above title of a selection by Pema Chodron?  Here is the sentence in context:

We may think meditation will improve us, but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now.

When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are. It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.” . . . 

But lovingkindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.

Maybe the fundamental delusions are
1. that we're not okay, and
2. that we can be someone else.

Trouble is, the culture tells us we're not "normal," and the psychiatric establishment pedals the idea of getting rid of that crazy mind.  Psychotropic medications do indeed change you at a fundamental level, the very activity of the brain. They are meant to change you, your energy, your emotional responsiveness, your impulses, and they do.  They affect the same creativity that can express itself in hallucinations or voices.  What to do?


Meditate, I think. Just sitting I learned to see my emotions rise and fade, see how sometimes they were fueled by my elaborate thought-trails, and sometimes just arose for no reason at all.  Learned (slowly, slowly) that I could sit still and not say a thing and not act on strong emotions.  That I could say to a bad memory, I don't want to go there now.   That I could choose when to act crazy.

As for my personal life, I am thinking about that very small dose of Seroquel that has been helping me sleep.  I am in a phase of profound physical healing right now, nine months since the transplant, three months since any infection, though my ordinary herpes is manifesting in cold sores, result of all the heat and light of July.  Not the moment to make a significant change.

If you read this far, you deserve a treat.  Here it is.

The myriad things

[image: Snow on screens, Tom Tucker, taken with film]
Getting my EPO from the special mail-order pharmacy - not there yet, but a little step just now, the phone call verifying that I will pay the co-pay, and that the delivery date works (it comes refrigerated). The end is not here, but there's a little satisfaction with each small step. Isn't that how a pilgrimage should be?
~~~~~
Called up my friend to see how she's feeling and discuss our shared sense of being overwhelmed - the mess of carnivale (Christmas) to clean up. Much harder than it was to get it all out and decorate the house, because we want to organize it as we put it back. Ah, desire. Delusion.
~~~~~
later - Swamped by practical tasks, but got two e-mails, one related this blog, perhaps hoping for my endorsement of a book (think of that), another from a high-school girl in the Phillipines wanting some information about my story. Answering these things rose to the top of the to-do list, even as they filled my center with a soft happiness. I am a writer. I still am, as hard as it is to fit it in. Just yesterday I read something snarky by a writer about how writers hate these requests. Like people get in the way of your work. Maybe that's a guy thing.
~~~~~
If Wun would handle the mail every day as it comes in instead of, say, tossing it on the kitchen counter, Wun would never have a messy accumulation that takes 15 minutes to sort, and might result in your Rewards check being thrown away. This is one of about 10,000 good habits that it takes to keep a neat, clean life. I think it is probably too late to form all of them starting at age 67.
~~~~~
Some days nothing will satisfy the cat.

The Great Reality Show

Today we have been slowly eating an elephant, cleaning up after a long Open House yesterday in which nobody, thankfully, felt the need to clean up as the day went on. So wax from the candles on his antlers dripped onto the brass reindeer, plates and red napkins and silver forks were laid down anywhere, cookies spent the night on the dining room table. Just now I took a rest from straightening up to lunch with last Sunday's New York Times, and scanned the Week in Review, which is always fun this time of year, and even better at the end of a decade.

I am struck by how various columnists and cartoonists talk about the same thing - that this was a decade in which massive dreams were punctured and failed. Columnist Frank Rich poses Tiger Woods as an example of a delusion somebody should have seen through, just like the housing bubble and the teetering accumulation of consumer debt. Shared delusions that fell to ground with a thud.

What this brought to my mind was my own series of dreams. Last night, as we relaxed in the after-party, I told a friend how I entered the PhD program at Ohio State in 1990 to fulfill a dream of teaching I had held onto for 20 years. And how five years later I walked out of the program with the degree and the knowledge that I never wanted to teach college again, not like that.

Many things had gone into the formation of that dream, including some fine experiences in my first years of teaching in the early seventies. And there were many ways higher education had changed in the years since, a new cynicism in the students, careerism in the faculty. But to pare it down to the bare bones, my four years of teaching in the graduate program showed me that it was not at all what I remembered. Or dreamed of.

I don't know what a dream is made of. Parts and pieces, like everything else. How my mother was so impressed, and referred to me back then as "my daughter, the professor." How it was the first time I had a job where I was treated as an equal and allowed to create my own work, assign anything. The seventies were a time of ferment when we could play with new ways of doing the old thing, trying to teach kids to love the written word. It was a time of change, when change seemed important, and positive. "Not always so," Suzuki Roshi cautions us, but I hadn't read him back then. I graded essays listening to Hair.

This for sure: you hold on to a dream with your mind, probably both halves of it. A dream is an idea, generated by the mind, clung to by whatever that mechanism is, mostly mental I suspect, but probably some in the body as well. Americans are particularly prone to dreams. The country was founded by people who dreamed wealth would save them, and wealth could be found around the edge of the world if the dragones didn't get you.

Zen actively discourages us from paying attention to dreams and ambitions. In sitting in meditation, we do nothing but count or watch the breath. We watch ideas rise like little tendrils of smoke from incense out of the mind, and we let them go and return to the breath. We do not run from the cushion to write down our thoughts and dreams; in fact, that is actively discouraged. We are encouraged to be mindful of what life is presenting to us minute by minute, of the small things that need done, and done by us, and done with care.

Last night, after we had discussed our big, difficult dreams, we got to talking about our e-mail inboxes. Mine has ahh, 440 posts sitting in it. A number of them are tagged. Another 2200 rest in the dialysis and transplant boxes, a great collection of information, most of which I haven't yet read. Every year this time I start paring this down, especially that inbox, in the hope of getting to zero. A small dream. An activity, really, like sweeping the path as the wind blows new leaves down.