Things I Want to Buy and the Three-Day Rule

A recent review of my personal finances has led me to once again list things I want instead of buying them with one-click on Amazon.

I don't need one-click shopping to get in trouble. I did this for a while some 15 or 20 years ago when I thought I needed a cool-down period before shopping.  It is a simple habit. When I want to buy something (other than groceries and other necessities) I write it down (on the memo on my smart phone), with the date, and refrain from buying it for three days. I'm not "postponing" a purchase. I'm giving an impulse a waiting period to see if I really want the thing in three days or have thought better of it.

I'm sure I picked this idea up from a helpful book.  Not the book shown to the right. It's here because it was a sudden keen desire for this book that made me suspect I need to slow down and finish the last book I bought.

I learned about this book in one of John Tarrant's generous pieces on koans. This one was, "If you turn things around you are like the Buddha," which Tarrant notes is found in the above collection.   I think you do it like this:

You have a thought ~
I waste too much money on impulse items.

You can turn that around and think~
I don't waste money enough.
or, in my case,
I don't waste enough time.

Actually, I personally do.  I waste a whole day every Sunday.  And I waste money enough, I believe. Yesterday my new UP24 arrived. This is a bracelet (like a FitBit) that coordinates with my phone and logs my steps, graphs my sleep, and vibrates every 45 minutes to remind me to get up and stretch. And logs my food, if I want it to.  It seemed like a silly luxury, but 24 hours with it has me feeling like it's the greatest thing I ever did. I think it will help me get back in shape and be honest with myself about what I eat.

from HenriettaAndMorty on Etsy

The above pillow, on the other hand, is pretty nonfuctional.  I added it to the wait list yesterday.  Buddha with a sense of humor. Really, I love it, and if I had to choose I'd probably get more joy from it than another book of koans.  I do like koan work; over the years it has nourished my general ability to feel joy.  Here's a personal koan I have often carried with me when I shop for clothes~

Does this make you want to do a little dance of happiness?

Actually, it does.

Nobody Understands Me

My favorite Cezanne, Still Life With Apples

Remember that little song from childhood?

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me,
Think I'll go eat worms...

I'll stop there.  It was common in my youth, maybe because it poked fun at something we all feel sometimes - that nobody understands us.  And still do, even in old age.  That is especially true if you are making some radical change in your life.  Your actions make other people wonder if, well, maybe they should join the Peace Corps or go vegan.  Even when you mind your own business, if you are different than the flock, you are an agent of change.  A therapist cautioned me once that nobody likes an agent of change.  She didn't say this, but look what they did to Jesus.  Gandhi.  Martin Luther King.*

So recently I found myself high on a windy hill, and I gave this some thought.  One of my conclusions was, If somebody feels overly responsible to you (a parent, a sibling, a grown child), they get frightened that they're going to have to bail you out.  I think being over-responsible is itself a stressful way to live.  Another thought was, If somebody really would never think of doing what you're doing, but now if you do it, they might have to think about it - obviously, that could engender defensiveness and hostility.  Or if what you're doing scares them for whatever reason, they may prefer to detach from you.

And so it is.  When people you know and love are critical and reactive about a choice you're making, they have a problem.  You have an opportunity to examine your actions thoughtfully, and be brave.  You have a problem insofar as you depend on someone else's affection or understanding. 

In spiritual traditions the idea seems to emerge time and again, that maturing is sometimes a lonely road.  I remember the chills I got when I read the first lines of Dante's Inferno:

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.

 There is also an intriguing Zen koan that John Tarrant has spoken to:

 "The moon sets at midnight; I walk the streets of the town alone."

And there you are, with nothing but your vow of pilgrimage and maybe a map (though, as we know, the map is not the territory).  And these days, your GPS.
~~~~~~~~~~
*Not that I compare myself to them. Joan of Arc, maybe.
 

Vaughan Bites the Lime

Henri Matisse, Still Life With Oranges (and maybe a lime)

The false self is the self of duality, the self of self-consciousness and limitation. Our true self is as wide open and unstructured as this very moment. Sesshin challenges us to experience this moment without limitation, without thinking good or evil, without thought of "how we are doing" or what we are accomplishing or failing to accomplish by our sitting. 
Barry Magid 

It's me, still working on that koan I discussed last time, which is working on me as I piece around in James Ford's The Book of Mu.  What I'm getting is that the point is just to be here experiencing reality.  You can get very fancy with koan work, but the point is almost laughably simple.  Just be open to reality.  A baby can do it. 

I wish I had managed to videotape our godson Vaughan one Sunday at brunch when he vigorously communicated his desire for a lime wedge on his Dad's plate.  He was under one year old, a dynamic, curious child.  His Dad gave it to him, he turned the lime around, quite a feat in little fingers, looking at it, squeezing it to see what it would do.  He touched his tongue to the skin.  Made the decision and bit down on that lime.  The expressions that played over his face were priceless, starting with shock and awe.  I can't describe that visible flow of direct experience.  Maybe you could try it yourself in front of a mirror.  I can't, I laugh just imagining it.

We get so fancy about life, how to live, and oh, how to fix ourselves.  People get very fancy about the Zen retreats mentioned in the quote, which are called "sesshin," and there can be a complex "etiquette" and rituals to follow.  The idea is that following all this encourages you to pay attention to your movements every moment, though it does seem easy to fall in love with all the theater of it and forget the point.

The goal is actually so simple:  just be here.  This moment.  Then keep doing that.  Being wide open.  Biting that lime.

Living With a Chemical Imbalance

When I woke up this morning, I knew this was a good day.  Actually, that's the schedule lately, good day, bad day, like clockwork.  Very strange, but then the bipolar mind is different than boring old sanity. As I was being glad I felt good, the koan came in, the one I've been carrying around for about thirty years.  I've written about it before.

If you do not say good
and you do not say not-good
then what is the nature of reality?

That got me thinking how I could describe these days without the evaluative terms good and bad. 

one type of day is -
high-energy in all chakras - it's remarkable
active,
interested in ideas
tend to talk and write a lot
very creative
motivated to do things,
enjoy art and beauty,
filled with loving impulses -
and I like that kind of day.  Who wouldn't?

the other type is -
low-energy all around
passive,
quiet,
uninterested,
unmotivated,
struggle to just do essential things
vaguely dissatisfied with everything, little feeling
tendency to sad, morbid thoughts - 
A mood too many people are familiar with, and no one I know likes it.

Like/don't like is about preference.  You may say everybody would prefer that high-energy day, and that wouldn't surprise me.  Still, the day is not intrinsically good or bad.  Those words are assessments.

If you just describe these moods, they are primarily different energy states.  There are roughly three approaches to any mood or condition:
.  just experience it
.  try to change it
.  try to escape it
I almost left out approach #4
.  grouse and whine.

Changing the state - You learn to do that when you feel too high. Sit down, shut up, breathe. Meditation is obviously good practice for this. And a bipolar needs to do it or come across like a Labrador Retriever puppy.  Changing the low state is harder, and often I just try to escape/endure.  Now that I think of it, there are ways to work with your own energy.  I studied kundalini with an excellent teacher once (Hi, Kit), and I know there are yoga poses that build energy.  I've also done some chi gung. There's a course in that at our local rec center, and I'm planning to sign up for that.

But what about the "just experiencing" part?  That sounds very Zen. Yet - who wouldn't want to pull the thorn out of your paw?  Enduring a mood is easy to do when it's high-energy full of dopamine and serotonin; I lose myself in whatever I'm doing.  Experiencing the low-energy state - not. I'm really fond of escaping it when I can find fiction to read or a movie.  This kind of chemically-based condition doesn't seem to benefit from self-examination and self-talk the way situational depression can.  And that's all I know.  Your thoughts are welcome.

Following the pathless path

Jizo in the snow, photo by Tom Tucker

This morning I read Open Buddha's review of Footprints in the Snow, an autobiography I also like, and noted that Sheng Yen wrote a book on the Chan form of koan work.  My first response to this news was, I'd like to get that.  Next, I remembered that I have mostly lost interest in formal koan study, which was very good for me when done with Ama Samy, whose method is unique, and good for me in altogether a different way when I worked with Daniel Terragno, whose traditional method was guaranteed to arouse my striving and thus my frustration.  There's a book in that sentence.

Koan work appealed to that in me that longed for mystical, intuitive engagement with the truth.  In fact, the beginning of my work was in a dream after I got home from my first retreat with Ama Samy, one of whose books is titled after the koan, Why did Bodhidharma Come from the West?  I dreamed a deeply felt answer, woke up briefly to write it down that night, and the next day wrote to him about it.  This was in 1999.  He wrote back to me with another koan, "Who is that one?," and I carry that koan to this day, realizing more all the time that this one is compiled of a thousand thousand bits that shift constantly - the truth of no fixed limited self.

During the years that I worked with Ama Samy while on retreats, I also worked with the first book in the Japanese tradition, The Gateless Barrier.  I worked with three copies of it, in fact, by three teachers, studying each koan hard, thinking about nuances.  I embraced this study gladly, finding it much more fulfilling than the graduate studies in literary theory I had recently completed.

It made its way into Zen-flavored humor written by Sherlock, my cat, which I intended to collect as The Sound of One Paw until I got felled by one real-life koan after another.  I also read and reread John Tarrant's marvelous collection, Bring me the Rhinoceros.  In all this, each koan worked its way into my mind.  It's something Tom and I share in that intimate way of the long-married, casual references to something we both did and that we understand.

Well, this is a shorthand description of a few years of journey.  My interest in koans tapered off - I couldn't say when.  At the time, I felt like I was failing.  But now I notice that I carry all those koans, and they often pop up in response to some event.  My practice has become more flexible, is changing all the time.  I'm about to pick back up yin yoga, taking advantage of Lulu Bandha's online site, recommended by the best and most generous yoga teacher I've ever known, Kit Spahr.  I am again interested in poetry, writing my own, reading others'.  On retreat, I was very moved by the visible world, and took photographs, including a sequence of a sunrise and one of a sunset that I'd like to turn into mini-slideshows and publish.  And, well, going to the health club - I have never been attracted to exercise - is a way of recognizing the basic principle of cause and effect we call karma.  Practice is all over the place, if you think about it.

I suspect all serious practitioners think deeply at times of throwing over the householder's life and entering residence, spending more time on formal practices like meditation and calligraphy.  I don't, anymore.  I'm too bonded to Tom, my neighborhood, my home, my church.  Besides, I'd drive them crazy.