Evolution

Our community is reserved for people who are over 55.  People over 55 are a famously crotchety bunch.  Many of us are way over 55 and most of us are retired.  So if you're still young let me say this: do not fuck with old, retired people.  We don't have anything to do except keep an eye on our neighbors.  A critical eye.  We look out the front window and if we see someone we don't know we say: "Who's this?  What's he doing?" We don't like noise or messes or big dogs and we loathe children with all of their yelling and running around and making a racket.  Ironically, as people age they express a great deal more happiness and satisfaction in their lives but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who'd admit to that.  If you move into a community for older adults you'll find that there are more rules to follow than you can imagine. There are rules for infractions I don't know what the infractions are.  I assume they're made up infractions.  I assume that most of the rules - many of them seem petty and obvious - came into being because someone violated a common sense practice.  For instance, you are not allowed to wash your car in you own driveway, having instead to take it to kind of a washing bay.  I, personally, do not do this.  Call management and complain if you will but I'm not going to drive my car with all my car-washing gear and wet chamois and soaps somewhere else to do the washing.  There are car-washing establishments if I want to drive somewhere else.  I'm a pretty good neighbor and I get along with my neighbors so no one has ratted me out yet but I see some fluttering curtains.  They're keeping an eye on me.  They know what's going on.

Anyway, one rule is that you can't work on boats in your driveway.  Boat Guy did this.  And you can't store bags of crap in your backyard and - guess what? - there's the birth of Garbage Bag Guy who is the same Guy as Boat Guy which is doubly irritating while also being convenient when you finally get fed up enough to rat someone out.  You're supposed to have plants in your little front yard but the weirdos across the street don't do this but I don't care.  I like them.  The man next door is pretty deaf so from time to time he'll blast Mexican music while he's grilling skirt steaks or whatever tough, inedible meat he likes to grill.  Fair enough and no harm, no foul.  My car is loud when I head off to the Keep It Complicated meeting early in the morning.

So Boat Guy/Garbage Bag Guy has been storing a lot of wood and other random garbage-ey crap in his backyard which is definitely not allowed.   We shrugged and let it pass . . . until we had our second rat infestation in the crawl space under our house.  I have no proof that his crap is the genesis of the rats but if I was a rat a big pile of musty, dark wood might make a nice home to raise my rat family.  SuperK has now christened him Rat Boy which is an excellent nickname.  An excellent third nickname which is one nickname too many.   No plants in your front yard?  Eh.  Loud salsa music sometimes?  Meh.  Rats under my house which are expensive to eradicate?  Fuck that.

Assume:  To accept something as true without proof (commonly held definition); to pretend to have a different name or to be someone you are not, or to express a feeling falsely (how interesting!).

I assume most people are idiots while assuming the identity of someone who doesn't think most people are idiots.  A Win-Win for Seaweed!  The evolution of words can be so interesting.  Assume was a Latin word that roughly meant to take on oneself but evolved into this more sinister meaning over the years.  An assumed identity.  I assumed that I knew what the fuck I was doing.  No one else assumed this but I assumed I was fooling them.

There is a very human tendency to write a story based on assumptions.  I see someone in a Porsche I assume they're rich.  I see someone digging a ditch I assume they're not smart.  I see . . . I see . . . I see . . . There was a man in Cincinnati who had more sobriety than I did but no front teeth.  He dressed in clothes that suggested a life of manual labor.  Arrogant prick that I am I created a persona for this guy and I was way, WAY off.  I took the time to get to know him and this dude read more that me and I read a LOT.

The Toltecs warn against this tendency of our flawed minds to filter everything through our past experiences, to supplement new information with these existing beliefs and experiences.  And voila! we know the future!  Assumptions based on past experiences can wreak havoc on our lives.

If I draw two thirds of a triangle on a piece of paper or an incomplete circle or half of a bicycle most people will finish the picture in their minds based on what they have already experienced.  I assume this satisfies some ancient instinctual impulse but it also can lead to mistakes in our awareness.

Because I love thinking about the human mind, trying to understand why we do what we do, I'll toss in something called the Action Bias which is the tendency to choose some action over doing nothing.  The best example is a soccer goalie defending against a penalty shot.  The goalie will almost always try to anticipate an attempt to the left or to the right and dive in that direction while - statistically - standing in the middle of the goal is going to give him or her the best chance to block the shot.

Eck-wah-NIM-eh-tee

Equanimity:  (In many spiritual traditions) A balanced, stable state of mind that remains undisturbed by life's ups and downs.  It means meeting pleasure and pain, praise and blame, or success and failure without clinging to them or fighting with them.  It is an alert, caring presence and not emotional coldness.

The Eight Worldly Winds: (In Buddhist traditions) Gain and Loss.  Pleasure and Pain.  Praise and Blame.  Fame and Disrepute.  Equanimity lets a person watch these shifting conditions pass by without letting emotional storms control their actions.  

True equanimity cares deeply while staying non-reactive.  This doesn't mean doing nothing - it means creating the clear mental state needed to make wise decisions.  It's the liberating quality that  allows us to keep our hearts open and balanced, quiet and steady, in the midst of life's inevitable vagaries.  We don't scream "Foul!" when things don't go our way and we don't sit there with a self-satisfied look on our faces, nodding smugly, when we get what we want because we don't know what we want, most of the time, and even when we get it we're just going to want more.  If that's not frustrating enough sometimes when we get what we want it doesn't work out in our favor in a real meaningful way.

I'm reading a Mark Twain novella right now which is centered around a dude named Satan.  Not that Satan, who we all can agree is a pretty bad dude, but a nephew named after his uncle.   Nephew Satan is slumming around on earth, really quite dismissive of humans and their often cruel, self-centered natures, always preferring the company of animals who he believes have purity in their actions and intentions.  In the course of his wanderings he befriends three young boys and tries to teach them that all of our actions mean something in the long run, that if we get what we want that it may cause incalculable suffering later on.  As an example, he tells the boys that one of their friends is going to sneak out of the house one evening and then drown in the river while attempting unsuccessfully to save a child who was swept into the current.  The boys are bereft and ask Satan what they can do to change the course of events so that their friend stays alive.  Satan agrees to do this but only if they will allow him to show them how their friend's life will play out in this changed reality.  The friend contracts polio and lives for many years, bedridden and in pain, trapped in an iron lung and the small girl is forced into a life of prostitution when her parents are killed in a train accident.  The lesson is we are not assured that if we let our puny human minds decide the future will  improve.  It is the reminder that we need to stay present and enjoy every minute, doing the best we can to be good, decent people, certain in the knowledge that life is unspooling in a manner that we'll never be able to comprehend.

Equanimity is a profound quality of strength and evenness of mind undisturbed by emotional upheavals.  The ability to maintain an inner balance and calm, no matter what may be happening around us.  We try to strengthen our observation skills so that we may see and understand the whole situation instead of one little part.  The Pali word is upekkha which means "balance" and it refers to our ability to arrest the mind before it falls into extremes.

"When you listen to the voices in your head, do you hear words of fear and judgment and stories that cause inner conflict and struggle?  Or do you hear words of support, unconditional love, and self-acceptance?"

The Toltecs

Root Canals!

 Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment on purpose and without judgement. It is the basic human ability to be fully aware of where you are, what you are doing, and how you feel, rather than being overly reactive or overwhelmed by thoughts.

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment through a gentle, nurturing lens.  Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them.  Without believing, for instance, that there's a "right" or "wrong" way to think or feel in a given moment.  When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we're sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.  Life slows down.  I make better decisions when I'm listening for that small, still, inner voice instead of careening down the freeway at a hundred miles per hour.

This is from a Hazelden meditation book: "Today we can slow down the pace and notice the things around us."  More mindfulness.  More reminders to be present.

The Toltecs: "If I see working through the filter of 'I want to" it is because I have placed my intent in that direction; I am working willingly.  Remembering this makes all the difference in the world.  Recognize you always have a choice, and once you've made a decision, follow through without  resistance.  You don't 'have to' do anything; but do choose to do many things, for many different reasons."

I dunno.  This is one lovely intent but it's pretty tough to willingly go and have a root canal.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a conscious, voluntary decision to let go of resentment, bitterness, and anger towards someone who has hurt you.  It is aimed at personal peace and emotional healing rather than forgetting the offense or reconciling with the wrongdoer.

Forgiveness is not forgetting the event but releasing the emotional hold that it may have over you.

Forgiveness is a release of resentment and anger.

Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which one changes their feelings and attitude toward the offender and in so doing overcomes the impact of the offense, including negative emotions like resentment and a desire for vengeance.

Vengeance!  Vengeance is mine!

Forgiveness helps me.  It releases me.  I try to compare the impact of a wrong done to me with the slow, grinding pain that I endure while plotting revenge for that wrong.  It's a slaughter.  It's not close.  

Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing will annoy them more.

This is all plagiarized from brilliant thinkers and seers and sages across time.  Except for one little bit that's mine.  How hard is it to forgive and how wonderful the benefits!  That we're shocked about this is what's shocking.  How easy it is to nurse a grudge, to feed it well, keep it warm and safe while it grows from a mouse to a T-Rex.

Ozzie and Montaigne and Ralphie . . . Sitting in a Tree . . . .

Sometimes things make sense and sometimes I'm clueless.  I'm clueless more often than I'd like to be but I'm encouraged by the fact that I'm not always clueless and that some of the time the bouts of cluelessness aren't absolute.  I was lost in the wheels of confusion.  I was the guy that other people were watching and saying: "That dude has no clue."

Here's a side note: for a while when I was struggling to come to terms with the concept of a Higher Power I considered using Ozzy Osbourne.  I was vaguely aware that this wasn't a great idea but being vaguely aware of anything was a big step up from being completely clueless.  I figure I could do worse.  Here are sample lyrics which explain why he was even a candidate:

Lost in the wheels of confusion,

Spinning through valleys of tears.

Eyes full of angry delusion,

Hiding in everyday fears.

I heard these lyrics and they buried themselves deeply into my subconscious immediately.

Ironically, most of the lyrics were written by the bass player Geezer Butler who was a seriously religious kid and seriously considered entering the priesthood.  Go figure and before you judge someone in a band called Black Sabbath mayhaps you should keep an open mind.

Sometimes I have a topic which I write about and sometimes I don't.  So here I am writing about Black Sabbath in a blog ostensibly about recovery.

Okay, let's go deep:
"The height of wisdom is to take things as they  are . . . to endure what we cannot evade."
Montaigne

Lest you look down your nose at me for worshipping Ozzy Osbourne consider this quote from Montaigne, one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance.  He wrote in the 16th century which was a long time ago to be so smart.  Basically, this quote is a forerunner to The Serenity Prayer.  Have the wisdom to understand what you can do and what you cannot.  It's not always action.  Action is easier than waiting.

I once had a T-shirt that had two vultures sitting on a tree branch, one of them quipping: "Wait?  Dammit, I want to kill something."

"What must I do is all that concerns me - not what people think.  It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own - but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now Ralphie was writing in the 20th century and so was Ozzy and Geezer so there's that.  Ralphie has as a core philosophy that the natural world was a living, spiritual canvas where God, humans, and the universe were deeply unified.  How cool is that shit?  I tell people all the time that if you're having trouble establishing your own personal Higher Power connection go outside in as quiet a place as you can manage and look around you, have a listen, because there's a lot going on and much of it is pretty cool.

"I greet the ups and downs of life's journey with unconditional love for myself and the people in my life by understanding that I am only truly alive in the present moment:  the future is a projection that does not exist."

The Toltecs

Error . . . . Uhhhhh . . . . One Day at a Time!

Negative Seaweed

"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's attitude, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father."

Jules Feiffer

Negativity Bias: The human tendency to give more attention, weight, and value to negative words, experiences, and information than to positive ones of the same level.  They're more psychologically intense.  If you eat a good pear - it's delicious! - but if you eat a bad piece of meat - you're dead!

Starting out with a bad attitude, a suspicious one.

Tomorrow I have a cardiologist appointment in the morning and a dentist appointment in the afternoon.  I'm feeling some negativity here.  And I'm swimming before the appointments which doesn't count as a positive experience.

Luckily, we are not our thoughts.