Picture was taken last week, when things were significantly warmer and more beautiful.
I am well into the swing of things lately. Not having Xopher at home anymore. My crazy new/old job. My dearly beloved ability to groove in my own routine. Remembering that I can’t get anything out of this life; I can only live inside it.
Holy Expletive, what a day I had at work, back at my “old” job, henceforth known as my “job”, as of yesterday. The big project they wanted me for hasn’t started yet, so I thought in the interim, things would be peaceful, dull, I’d sit around quietly waiting for someone to assign me something. OMG things are such a mess. I had been like, why the hell do they have to pull me back two months shy of the year I was supposed to be rotating? I guess I see now.
And look what arrived today, as if the cheesecake weren’t enough. CoffeeCoin was the “token” project back at TechLab, and my former manager wanted me to have this memento. Good times, those were.
Nobody puts their horrible fails on social media! Well I’m here to tell you, for every thing I do with my hands that manages to come out right, there are at least ten things that are utter fails. I had intended to put some beadwork around this hat. I need a lot of practice finishing beadwork. I’m just gonna ditch the whole thing at this point, take the beads apart, I wasn’t that crazy about it anyway.
I wrote to the great Oliver Burkeman and the great Oliver Burkeman wrote me back!!!
I wrote this.
“
I feel like there is a contradiction underlying Four Thousand Weeks. One thread is basically this:
And OTOH, you are constantly repeating some variation of the following: all of this should feel liberating and exhilarating, because now you can finally be freed up to focus on what matters.
But isn’t the first thread trying to convince me that, actually, nothing “matters”?
I do find the first thread liberating and exhilarating. But when you keep telling me, “Well! Now, time to get on with it! You know, that thing that REALLY MATTERS?” I’m like, what, what, what? I’m supposed to have a mattering-thing?
“
He wrote,
“Thanks, Chris! Fascinating point.”
And he wrote more. But I don’t think it’s right to publicly publish his words without his permission. Except for that “Fascinating point” bit, no way I’m not mentioning that.
Basically he argues that the first thread is meant to clear away illusions so what matters for you can bubble up to the surface.
Generally one weekend right around this time of year you will be bound to find us gourding.
Today’s Burkemanian quote is from ‘modern-day spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti’, who partway during a lecture leaned forward and said ‘almost conspiratorially, “Do you want to know what my secret is?… You see, I don’t mind what happens.”‘
Today I tore out the tomato jungle and went gourd-shopping with my life partner and smelled the autumn leaves.
“Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again & again & again…” burkeman
“In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry you make it double; don’t worry, be happy.” earworm
Maybe instead of counting their blessings, people should count their problems.
a) Maybe counting your problems will get you used to the fact that ye problems, ye will always have with ye
b) Maybe counting your problems day after day and noticing how you nevertheless continue to exist and function would be therapeutic
Problems! I got ’em! Count ’em and weep!
Tonight I have a goat who is very sick indeed. Not even the one who broke her horn.
“This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood… [until] it finally dawns on us, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.”
‘I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees… I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves…
We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another. And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
And I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with….’
Richard Powers in an interview with Ezra Klein.
Tytania 