Monday of This Week

 there are 66 days left in 2020. And I need to write 56 more posts to get to 200. Should be doable!

This week I want to make 3 comics for the summer camp book. I want to run a good workout on Wednesday. I want to be in a mindset where I feel energized to do cool stuff and share those things with others. 

I bought this canned stir fry from Kroger last week and it was SUPER salty and then I got really dehydrated and was in bed/slept for 11 hours and did not feel like I was in the best head space this morning. The things that got me out of bed were the leafblower outside my window and my roommate reading his paper out loud downstairs. But here I am now!

I want to recognize how I feel and make a plan to start feeling better. I started a project yesterday that was pretty fun. I think I'll go work on that and then go climbing and then get groceries. And drink lots of water.

I don't hate Google's updated icons. I kind of like the colors. 

My spiritual thought of the day is that we are always remeeting each other as different people. We meet, we interact, we go off, we change, we meet again. We have to embrace change.

Daily Blarble

 I have a group of friends from college that I play Dungeons and Dragons with and last night I posed the question to our group chat:

    "If, on some level, my character exists and was created by me, a higher dimensional intelligence, then what if I am also the character being used in a turn-based role playing game?"

Well, you could say that obviously isn't true because our existence is way more detailed and elaborate than any D&D game. Maybe. We know our own brains are filling in information that isn't really there all the time. 

I really only like theories about why we exist if they can inform how we might best exist. What we should do with life is way more interesting than why we have it. In the case of a role playing game, I don't know.

We did have a good discussion about the differences between living your life as a player character or an NPC (non-player character). Are you doing things that main characters in a story would do or are you a background character? That gets back to a question I asked the kids when I was student teaching in a 9th grade English classroom, "would you rather live a long, safe, boring life or a short but passionate one?"

At the time I said the long but boring one. I think I still stand by that. Although maybe I'm less sure of that than I was at the time. 

My favorite advice is still from Waking Life and it's to live as if you're a dream character in another person's dream.

comic I made with Julie

I took way too long to make this but I'm really happy with it now.

great workout this morning

 I did 10x 800 at 5 min mile pace. It's been a long time since I've done that much work that fast and it felt really good. I took a lot of rest so that contributed to the good feelings. Usually when I do a workout like that there comes a moment where I have to manage the pain and will myself to keep going. This morning I felt really in control the whole way and really confident. 

The past two workouts I've been doing easier versions of the workouts that the guys I train with are doing. They're in really good shape already and have been doing hard workouts for about two months now so I felt like I wasn't ready to attempt things at that level just yet. I don't think I would've been able to the 10x 1,000 that my friend did but I feel like the next workout is the time to go for it and see if I can hang on for the whole thing.

learning tired

I remember very early on when I started running I didn't really understand how to feel how tired my body was. I remember doing a workout by myself and wanting to run 800 meters in under 3 minutes. And I kept waiting for my breathing to go back to normal and once that happened I didn't really understand why I couldn't run faster than I'd ever run before. My body didn't feel tired and I was super motivated. Why was it not happening.

Pretty quickly I learned that you can only perform to your absolute best a relatively small number of times. I see it with the kids at my afterschool program too. They run a 400m loop around the playground as hard as they can and then after they've rested a bit they want to try to beat their time. I tell them, "halfway through you're gonna feel way more tired than you did the first time."

Sometimes they beat their time though. They still don't know how hard they can push themselves.

Anyway, I'm having to learn the same lesson in climbing. Today I felt fine and should've been able to climb really well and do some problems I haven't finished. And then I tried one that I know I can do without much difficulty and I was not able to stick the moves. It didn't matter how hard I tried, my hands were tired in a way that wasn't apparent until they were seemingly maxed out.

Unlike running, I really only enjoy climbing when I'm feeling my best or close to my best. It's not really fun to do a bunch of problems that I already know I can do. Although, that's like being dissatisfied with running a bunch of 7 minute miles when you know on your best day you can run sub 5 minute miles. They're still worth doing to improve. They're necessary. For now though climbing is mostly for fun and for cross training. So I'm not too worried about it. Just interesting to relearn the lesson of being tired.

Flung

 I'm sitting here and I guess I should start writing. I threw up a little bit in my mouth this morning while lying in bed. I can't remember the last time that happened. So that's interesting.

Today I want to get some illustrations done for the book and also send out more mail to people. 

One thing I'd like to talk to people about is trying to find things we believe without question and trying to get to a place where that belief or assumption makes zero sense. Like, when you learn about practices and beliefs from a different time or place and it hits you like "why would you ever think that?" It seems really hard to find within yourself.

Sometimes I walk down the street in my pajamas and I go sit on a retaining wall above a sidewalk and a busy street and I just sit there and eat fruit or hang out and watch people. It's really not a place for sitting or doing anything and you can tell, especially people in cars, are confused by it. It's fun though. The sunlight is good. And then that got me thinking about people who stand in the medians at busy traffic lights and interstate ramps. I think that's one of those things that we accept that is probably insane. People who are experiencing homelessness. I think it's ridiculous that we let that happen to people.

And the story that we make up about it. Well, they're dangerous. Drugs. It's drugs. They can't be helped. They refused to play the game. Some people are just like that. It happens everywhere. 

It seems like, if you allow people to be homeless, if you allow for this group of people who seemingly have nothing and can only get ahead by exceptional circumstances, then you have this backstop that will drive people to work very hard for very little out of fear. You don't want to end up like them. That's also a big part of white supremacy. A lot of poor whites in the South didn't want slavery to end even though it didn't benefit them in any way because it created a status that they were always above, by definition. 

I'm sure in a lot of ways I have no idea what I'm talking about right now but I think it's interesting to take a concept like homelessness and say, that makes zero sense, why are you okay with that? Maybe it changes your approach if you come from a place of, "the society that allows this to happen is sick and this shouldn't be a thing" rather than, "this is a problem that is innate and part of the natural universe across space and time that we will confront the best we can." Maybe?

Banana and Blueberries

 Banana and Blueberry Oatmeal this morning. 

Thinking about how Ram Dass calls a society a conspiracy. Everyone is saying and thinking the same things and that makes those things seem real. The difference between a lie or illusion and reality is whether or not everyone agrees and goes along with it. And any society is invested in maintaining those beliefs because it keeps people from freaking out and it's also set up in a way to keep the people who have power in power.  He calls it "relative reality". And it's really not about being right. It's about being able to hold two different perspectives (both of which are illusions) at once to see things for what they are and not be entirely inside of them. He says that he can use illusions to dispel other illusions as long as he knows at the end he's going to throw away all of them.

The really interesting part though I think is that when people ask him about their problems and hang-ups he refers to them as "mind states" that people are buying into and he dismisses them as uninteresting. 

So something like FOMO, fear of missing out. Or feeling like everyone is off living a much better life than you are right now. That's only real to the extent that you buy into that. That the best use of your time is spent doing things that seem interesting in a specific way to other people. You can spend your time worrying about it. But it doesn't seem very interesting.

The other thing he talks about is that feelings are still valid. You can't simply dismiss them with complete and perfect apathy. He says it's okay to be afraid or anxious or jealous or angry or whatever as long as you aren't busy being anxious or jealous or angry. Instead of saying, I am angry, you say, there is anger. As a thing that is watching the anger. 

There are some things I disagree with. Ram Dass talks about people coming up to him and saying, "I'm depressed" and he says, "are you really?" And they say, "yes. I'm depressed." And he says, "Well, is the person telling me they're depressed depressed?" And they say, "no." And he acts like it's this big a-Ha! moment that proves some part of them isn't depressed. And I get that that is all about looking at things at different levels and not being trapped in any one state of mind or feeling but also it came across as a bit dismissive. I don't know. How we view depression has changed a lot since the 90s when he was saying that. 

The takeaway for me is to accept how you feel and what you think, be honest about it, but then also ask, is it useful? Is it interesting? Is it doing anything for you? And I think there's a lot of power in that.