More Damn Grace

I think about meditation a lot.  I practice regularly.  I suck at it.  I have no idea how to do it effectively or how it's supposed to look.  And that's okay.  That is exactly what meditation is, sort of a clueless wandering awareness.  To me an apt analogy would be beginning to lift weights or to train for a marathon.  The important step is the first one - take a light weight and lift it or strap on a pair of running shoes that cost way more than is necessary for your first run.  There won't be any awareness of having taken a step toward a goal as you wheeze your way along, barely making it around the block, but without that initial gasping and choking for oxygen you sure as shit aren't going to get yourself in shape for a marathon.  I know in my personal meditation practice what has happened is that I find that I'm much calmer, much more present as I move through my day.  I'm not really aware of this calmness on a breath to breath basis but I know that life seems slower, more manageable, less alarming as the result of the meditation.  I don't jump to wild conclusions and act rashly - or as rashly, at least - as I used to.  People don't piss me off to the same degree.  When something pleasant happens I'm present enough to enjoy it and when something unpleasant happens, some pain or noxious stimuli or unwelcome encounter, I'm usually fine with it, not following it through to some wild, implausible conclusion.  "Eh, whatever" is a typical response.

Because I'm an Analogy Guy and because some of the teachers that I follow thrive on analogies, trying to give our tiny, rational minds some insight on how to approach meditation, I enjoy the imagery of little things changing while big things remain impermanent.  Sitting by a river and watching the constantly changing flow of water while noticing that the river is still a river - the water changes but the river endures.  Or watching clouds drifting across the sky, here for a moment and then gone, but the sky isn't going anywhere.  Lost in my thinking I'm drifting along through the clouds but then I burst through into the clear sky, into the sunshine, and voila! the sky is still there!  The clouds - my thoughts - are changing and intruding, as they should and they always have and they always will - but the sky - my awareness - will always be with me.

I talked to my old, dear friend yesterday - a retired banker and a retired pastor and how about the discord in that imagery? - about prayer and meditation.  It was so much fun to bounce ideas off of each other, his religious practice and my secular practice based on the non-traditional way that is Alcoholics Anonymous, and to see how much continuity there is between the two efforts, both of us, I think, striving to get to the same place, a place of love and understanding and perspective.  We talked about sweet, sweet grace and while I can get my dander ruffled a bit when I hear someone emphasize grace as a gift that an all-powerful God doles out I also listened as he emphasized how important it is to grant ourselves grace.  How many times I've listened to new people beating the shit out of themselves while trying to urge them to give their own damn self a break.

Gotta tell you that it was deeply, deeply satisfying to bounce these huge concepts off of another person - love and grace and the nature of God - not always agreeing but listening and pondering and finding many more points of agreement than of disagreement.  I'm quite taken with the imagery of water flowing down a river - the river doesn't change even though the water is constantly changing or watching clouds float by . . . the clouds move along but the sky is still there, is always there.

The Next 200 Miles: You and Your Tedious Thoughts

"Give us to go blithely on our business this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

Robert Louis Stevenson

You are not your thoughts.

Most of your thoughts are the result of you simply revisiting what you have already thought before.  They're not new thoughts.  You are thinking about the same useless crap over and over.  These sticky thoughts are very, very sticky.  They're hard to shake loose and when they reoccur they take you hostage.  I relitigate wrongs all the time.  I hang onto a current irritation or upset with a ferocious grip.  I go back and think about issues that will always be issues: my health, my loved ones, my finances.  Sticky thoughts.  My Greatest Hits.  I'm dying!  I don't have enough money!  My loved ones will leave me!  Garbage Bag Guy will pile up more garbage bags!

I love the idea that each day we have 6,000 distinct thoughts and 90% of them are repetitive.  (Ed. Note: This is all kind of suspicious.  Who, exactly, is counting these thoughts?)

I went to high school with a man who I believe embodies humility.  He's a tremendous athlete, quite handsome, a graduate of Harvard who had a spectacularly successful business career in finance,  information that is almost impossible to extract and when I bring it up he deflects immediately, and not in a shallow, insincere way but with what I sense is a genuine humility.

When he was in his 50s he told me that he was attending Divinity School at night, that he wanted to become a minister.  I was floored.  I was flummoxed.  I was struck speechless and I'm never speechless.  I always have speech.  "When did you become religious?" I asked, no doubt with some overt skepticism.  He simply said: "I've always been religious."  I'm so used to over-the-top, in-your-face, look-at-me religious people, so on the lookout for the occasional sanctimonious asshole that I forget the world is full of people who pursue their ideal of a Higher Power with perspective and humility and true intent.

We were exchanging some text messages about an upcoming reunion and about some of his old correspondence to me when the discussion veered into grace.  Being a man of the cloth his ideal, of course and naturally, was to talk about the idea that grace is a godly, heavenly thing, given to mortals who don't deserve it and consequently the source of all that is good in this life. He also talked about the practical application of grace in our daily lives.  Being an iconoclast I prefer to emphasize grace the other way around, concentrating on simple, human grace instead of the divine kind, but we both end up in the same place: recognizing the otherworldliness of grace while applying it to our minute to minute existence.

His notes almost made me cry.  They were so passionate while remaining so sincere that they were obviously deeply held and unshakeable.  Isn't that what we're all looking for?  The surety that we've found a way to move forward in our lives with kindness and love, forsaking (Ed. Note: I'm getting full of myself.  This is a good Biblical turn of a phrase.  Dammit!) selfish motives and shallow pleasures?

Forgiveness Heals All Wounds

Grace:  A willingness to be fair and forgive; the exercise of love, kindness, mercy, favor.

I've always loved this concept, this quality.  In my Christian upbringing, grace was primarily described as God's unmerited, undeserved favor - his free gift of love, forgiveness, and strength given to me despite my sins.  Sigh.  This still irritates me.  It feels full of self-importance on God's part.  What a big guy you are, God!  We're made with faults and defects by God and then God forgives us for our faults and defects?  When I'm made the next creator of the universe?  Then I'm designing life so that there aren't these faults and defects that need to be forgiven. While I do believe in Divine grace and am grateful to receive it this still sounds to me like doing something nice and expecting recognition.  Today, in my day to day activities, I try to extend grace to everyone I come across and to do it with humility and a lack of ego.  This is not easy and I fail much of the time but I've gotten a lot better at giving everyone and everything a break and not doing it with too much self-importance and self-congratulation.  God or a Higher Power or the universe has bestowed so much grace to me, buried me under tons of grace, treated me with love and kindness when I didn't deserve it and so much more often then treating me poorly, that I feel a calling to try to return the favor, to pay it back.

My morning meditation book today: "We don't have to have all the answers, or act in the most mature way, or be the best friend ever.  There is room for error in everything because nothing is gained in perfection the first time around.  We can make mistakes because mistakes are sometimes the only way to perfection."

When that driver in front of me doesn't use his turn signal today I think: "Eh.  Guy made a mistake" instead of flying off into a judgemental rage.  I continue to practice pausing a beat when I don't like something, letting awareness and perspective seep in, finding that much of the time I roll my eyes at the thought that I could have gotten angry and ruined my day and not changed anything and for something so unimportant.  So I beep at the guy and make an obscene hand gesture?  This is going to correct something?  This is going to make the guy think: "Oh, man, you're right, sorry.  I won't do that again, ever?"  Nine times out of ten it's just going to provoke an equivalent response and then not only have I ruined my day I've degraded someone else's day as well.

"Forgiveness heals any wound."

The Toltecs, the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, I mean, c'mon, forgiveness as a way of bestowing grace on oneself is an important load-bearing cornerstones of every spiritual practice that I know of.

On a Lighter Side

"Saying no from a place of anger can add force to our no, and for a moment we feel powerful.  But this feeling of power is illusory, and it always leaves us with an emotional hangover of negativity after the anger subsides.  It also causes suffering for those caught in its path."

The Toltecs

"An epiphany is something that comes to you out of the blue that your sponsor has been telling you for the last six months."

The 12 Steps save you from suicide.

The 12 Traditions save you from homicide.

A General Service committment makes you want to do both.

Lots Of Irritating Guys

You are driving your car and about to enter a long stretch of desert road when you see this sign: "The next 200 miles - You and Your tedious thoughts."

I read a study which estimates that a person has somewhere around 60,000 thoughts each day and that 95% of them are the same thoughts they had yesterday.

It's the breath.  Pay attention to that breath.  It's a great anchor and it's one thing that we share with every living creature on the planet.  When one of those 60,000 tedious, repetitive thoughts pop into my mind I try to remember to say: "Huh.  Look at that thought" and then refocus my attention back onto the next thought.  I try to remember that this is perfectly normal, that my brain has the ability to think and it's going to do it and it is not at all pleased that I'm trying to reestablish some semblance of control over its desire to return to tedious, repetitive, self-involved thoughts.  It's frustrating enough that most of what I'm thinking about is crap but to make matters worse it's the same crap I thought about yesterday.  I can't even come up with any new crap to think about.

One of my eternal loops of thinking is to remember that there is a rhyme and reason to my thinking, that it keeps me safe and it helps me stay prepared for what's going to come next.  That's well and good.  My problem is that the preparation mostly involves worry and planning about illogical and implausible things.  I have enough food.  I have a dry, warm, comfortable place to live.  I have friends and family and lots and lots of conveniences.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.  So where does my mind go?  Garbage Bag Guy!  Hot Tub Guy!  Boat Guy!  Okay, okay, Garbage Bag Guy and Boat Guy are the same guy but it sounds better to have three guys to be pissed at instead of just two guys.

What can I tell you?  There are a lot of irritating guys out there.

Where Have All the Garbage Bags Gone, O Where O Where Have They Gone?

I hope today that all of us remember that we're perfect just the way we are.  Just for today.  That doesn't mean I'm not a work in progress, that there aren't things I need to improve or to work on.  It means that I should give myself a break.  If I'm honest about it I'm never going to fully measure up to the impossibly irrational expectations I have of myself.  I suspect I believe deep down inside that I can achieve perfection when the surface reality is that if I can get to the point where I'm not a total fuckup then I'm doing okay.

I peeked over the fence today into Garbage Bag Guy's backyard and all the refuse was gone.  When does he get this stuff done?  I didn't hear him pile the bags up and I didn't hear him remove the bags?  Why doesn't he get a paying job so he no longer has to stack overfilled garbage bags right up to my fence line?  The format of the meeting yesterday - when the bags were still there and when I believed they would remain there indefinitely - is for the leader to read a paragraph from the first 164 pages of The Big Book and kick off the discussion based on that reading.  The sadistic son of a bitch that was in the hot seat selected this: "Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick, too.  We asked God to help us show them the same pity, tolerance, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended, we said to ourselves: "This is a sick man.  How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry.  Thy will be done."

Really, really annoying.

I do have to say that I find Bill's wording here a little condescending.  Big Spiritual Seaweed gets to show love and tolerance to some poor guy who doesn't know better.  It reeks to me of pious elitism.  Look at me - I'm in recovery!  A few years ago I was taking a shot of vodka first thing in the morning to steady my nerves and now I'm going to tolerate your shortcomings?  Pretty Big of me.  I love the words "pious" and "sanctimonious."  In layman's terms?  "My shit doesn't stink."

Garbage Bag Guy

Because I live in a warm climate homes generally don't have a basement - they have a crawl space.  I don't know - maybe no homes have a basement.  What do I look like?  A home builder?  In fact, upon some reflection, I have no idea why homes have basements.  I just assumed they're places to store more crap that you no longer need, that you never needed, and that you should just throw in the garbage.  I may have read once that cold weather climates cause the ground to shrink and expand so a basement is needed to counteract this.  I have no idea why I would remember that.  It sounds like something I'd make up.  I explained to a friend that the reason my hair was standing straight up in the air as the result of riding my motorcycle to the meeting.  "You have a motorcycle?" she asked.  "I have three motorcycles." I said.  If I'm going to make shit up I'm going to go all in.  If she believes I have a motorcycle I might as well own three of them.

Where I am here?  Oh, yeah, we had sneaky rats get into the crawl space a few years back, making entry through some poorly sealed openings that I guess allow the crawl space to breathe or something.  Get some air flow through that crawl space and I'll tell you this as well - crawl space is an apt description because you're going to have to crawl to get around in there.  A nice dude comes out, seals up the openings and catches all the rats, of which there were an alarmingly large number.  Now, the rats have returned.  The sneaky bastards found a small hole around a water pipe or electrical conduit or sewage outlet and took up residence again.  Not the same rats, I'm assuming, maybe some relatives.  Dude comes back out and is catching rats and sealing holes and all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.

I started to ponder why rats and why in my house?  We have fruit trees all around my property so I'm going to make an effort to keep any fallen oranges and tangerines collected and disposed of.  What else?  Where else for the source of the rats?  I peer over the fence into Boat Guy's back yard and what do I see but a whole ton of garbage bags which appear to be filled with bottles and cans for recycling.  I can only hope that's what they contain.  God help me if it's actual garbage.  For the record . . . he no longer has the boat - replacing that with a beat up old truck - so maybe he needs a new nickname?  Garbage Bag Guy? 

No way this is allowable under our community rules.  But I'm stuck again in the Conundrum:  Do I escalate this by contacting park management or by confronting Garbage Bag Guy directly?  It's amazing how things can spiral out of control once official mechanisms get activated.  Nonetheless, it's not fair to me that he's behaving like this.  No one else in the community is collecting cans and bottles for recycling.  No one else is parking junk trucks in their driveway.  No one else is irritating the shit out of me.

Fair disclosure - I'm hitting another age milestone that ends in a zero in December.  I've had some struggles with these numerically significant transitions.  It's uncomfortable to ponder the passage of another decade.  You look around at your friends and think: "This is it?  This is the best I can do?"  When you are young the End of Things is so distant it has no meaning.  Now the Grim Reaper is on the horizon.  He's still out there a bit but I can make something out and if I use binoculars I can definitely see someone in a black hoodie with a sharpened farming implement.  I have to be aware at times like this.  Boat Guy . . .  er . . . Garbage Bag Guy is no longer making a lot of noise so there's that.  Is the status quo bad enough to risk a new status quo?  Always possible that a new reality will  irritate the shit out of me in a different way.

Often, keeping my mouth shut works out best.  When I talk . . . bad things happen.  When I'm silent . . . things work out.