My $100 latte

Latte Venti Pricey
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At Starbucks today I bought a pumpkin praline pecan yada yada latte, an exotic foofy drink.  I don't usually go that fancy, but I was in a good mood and indulged.

I remember my first sip. Nice! I was glad I'd indulged. I took another sip. Quite good!

Then I sat down, pulled out my computer and went to work on my programming project.

Fade out.

Fade in.

It's an hour later. Maybe more. Time vanishes (as do I) when I'm programming. Or blogging. Or other stuff. I've had a win and I want to take a break. I deserve one! I wonder if there's any latte left. I reach out, and lift the cup. Yes! Not much,  but some.

I have another sip.

And it's good!

I walk around, make a phone call and go back to programming.

A while later I take another break, heft the cup and find it's empty.

Later, much later, I consider: one latte. It was 20 oz. It cost $4.00. I enjoyed it. But I only experienced three sips.

What did I pay for?

How big is a sip? Well, of course your mileage varies. Even mine will. It depends on the size of your mouth, the intensity of your thirst , and the temperature of the sippand (the thing you sip) and maybe the phase of the moon.

While I'm writing this I'm sipping another latte and attempting to calibrate. (The things I do for science!) I've had 10 sips so far and I don't think I'm a tenth of the way through the 20 ounces. Small sips, because the latte is pretty hot. So let's make a hot sip = 0.2 oz, and a cold sip = 0.4.

So I experienced 0.8 oz, or 1/50th of my previous latte.

If that 1/50th was worth $4.00 (before blogging) then I should rationally have been willing to pay $100 to experience the entire thing. Or if someone had offered me three sips of their latte (two hot and one cold) for the bargain, discount price of $3.50 I should have jumped at the chance.

Not likely.

One more argument for being more awake, present, mindful.

We give up money and time and other things we value for opportunities to experience pleasurable and interesting things. But having the opportunity to experience them does not mean we actually experience them.

We also need to be present for the experience. If not, we end up paying a higher price for whatever part--if any part at all--we do experience.

In this case, I paid a ridiculously high price. $100 for a latte? Are you kidding me?

Every time I reach for the latte I'm drinking now, I pay attention. Smaller sips. More attention.

I'm determined to get my money's worth.

Yak shaving my way to awarenes

Yak Shaving Tool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent an hour and a half yak shaving, this morning.

Ironically, I spent most of that time doing that which I was trying to avoid and didn't realize it until I was nearly finished writing this post.

Fuck!

Let me explain.

It started with a morning chat, in which I observed

"I do pretty well in the AM but the pattern is that I go more and more automatic as the day goes on"

Which is true. So my plan was:

About every so often (two hours I am thinking) I want to do a full reset. STOP what I am doing and do a bunch of stuff (TBD) to wake up and address the next block of time.

It's now 9:34. And I start do work on my "wake up" process.

So how to do that?

I thought: I'll create a Google Doc and every two hours or so I'll look back and write down what I learned and what I was thinking about and what I'm thinking about and what I'm going to do. And I'll use that as a reminder to stay awake, to be present, and not go into the state where I am mindlessly doing things.

Easy. Takes about ten seconds to set up a doc.

Except I'm pretty sure that I started a doc like that before. So I mindlessly browse through past docs looking for that one. Shaving the yak.

Yak shaving sometimes pays off in unexpected ways. In this case, I made a discovery. Several years ago by brother, sister and I went on a bonding trip to Arizona. With long hours of driving, I decided to pool our knowledge of family history and write it down. Which we did. I had my computer (of course) so I wrote it down. It's on a back up somewhere, and on my todo list is a task "find family history" that I faithfully recopy each time I rewrite my list.

But there it is! Some time ago I must have uploaded it to docs! Huzzah! So I write my brother and sister a quick email. The email time stamp says 9:40, so that didn't take too long. But I had no idea how much time it took.

I was deep, deep, in my yak shaving trance, and it was time to return to yak shaving.

After a bit more looking, I decided I would start a new one doc. Easy. Revision history says I started it at 9:42.

I copied the comments from the chat, the ones you see above, into it.

And I was about to note the date and the time, when...

Wait! 

If I'm going to put an entry in the doc every so often, doesn't it make sense to time stamp the entries?

And doesn't it make sense to make the process of time stamping automatic?

So doesn't it make sense to write a doc script that will do that?

As it happens, I have already found script like that, due to another yak shaving exercise. It puts in the date, not the date and time, but isn't that an easy change? I'll just cut and paste it into this doc and...

No. It's not easy, because I cut and pasted wrong. So I restart, and this time I do it right. And finally have it right, and yes, it wasn't that hard.

Yes it is. Here's my first automated time stamp entry: 

December 20, 2015 20:11

Yay. That took a total of 35 minutes, including finding the family history, and so on. So on to the main task: stopping, reflecting, and making a plan for the next block of time.

No, wait! Wait!

Wait!

It's not 20:11. That's like eight at night. It's ten in the morning. So my script is printing the wrong time because mumble mumble. 

But I can just change the script so it has the right time zone. Which takes some time to figure out.

And maybe it should run automatically the first time that I open it and put the date at the bottom. Which takes some time.

More mindless activity ensues as I encounter complexity on complexity on complexity, until, more than an hour later, nearly an hour and a half, including the short time I've spent writing this I'm ALMOST done.

And why, I now realize. WTF was I actually doing?

Well, I was working, automatically, to automatically time stamp a document whose entire purpose is to help me get myself off automatic.

Fuck!

Sorry, but, fuck.

Reading what I write

Awake (Godsmack album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I rarely go back and read what I I have written. When I do I'm usually pleasantly surprised. Like today, when I read this post about writing mindfully. I'll come back that post in a minute. But first:

Question for future me:

Will you please let me know why the fuck you never read what I've written?

 I kill myself trying to get these things done, and then what?  

Why am I writing if you never read what I write? 

WTF? Really?

Anyhow.

It took me a while to get to that post. So let me tell you (future me, and others) the story. Or one of the stories. First tell you the stories I am not going to tell.

I'm not going to tell you the story that begins:  "It all started when I reached 70, said 'WTF!' and started this blog."

I'm not going to tell you the one that begins: "It all started nearly 73 years ago, when I was born." Or the one that starts "It all started nearly 74 years ago, when my parents fucked."

I'm not going to tell you the one that begins: "It all started 13.8 billion years ago, when the universe exploded into existence and pretty much everything started."

All true. All different stories. But not the one I'm gong to tell.

Today's story starts in May, when I read Sam Harris' book Waking Up.  I realized (more than ever in the past) that I spent most of my life "not awake." And I wanted to wake up more often and for longer periods.

What was I doing when "not awake?"  Maybe in a waking dream. Maybe immersed in an illusion. But not, as I now define the term, awake.

What is awake?

For most of the time that I've been writing this, I've been "not awake." My conditioning, my programming, knows how to write blog posts. It does a pretty good job. A kick ass job, actually. I don't have to wake up to supervise it. I don't have to do a fucking thing. Sit down, type, and it just happens.

But now, right this moment, for this part of this post, I am awake. (Or have been for parts of the writing and editing, but not all.) The difference between blogging while not awake and blogging while not awake probably can't be perceived by anyone but me.

But I know.

When I am blogging while I am awake I do everything that I do when I'm blogging while not awake. The only difference is consciousness. In one case I am not conscious that I am doing what am doing it. I just let the system do it. In the other, there is. It may not be doing it, but it is conscious.

Right now, I am sitting at my computer keyboard, moving my fingers and words are appearing. That's been happening all along. Or at least I assume so, because--how else did those other words get here?But most of the time I was unaware. Now I am.

So who was writing the post before I woke up. And who is writing during the few moments that I've been awake?

More important: who is going to push the "Publish" button.

Reply from future me to the question that past me asked at the top. (Well, a short distance in the future me, but a future me is a future me, right?)

"Maybe it's because you make finishing a piece such a pain in the ass that by the time you finally press Publish I never want to see the fucking thing ever again.

"I'm just saying. 

"PS: maybe you should read what you wrote about the self being an illusion. 

Good job, future me. Nice way to wrap up this post.

The thing that I learned from rereading that post is this: no one needs to push the button.

Family matters

Family Matters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“That’s two posts today.”

“Three, if you include this one.”

“I wasn’t thinking of including it.”

“Yes, you were. I know you. Me.”

“OK, you caught me. I was thinking of posting it.”

“So post it.”

“I’m ambivalent.”

“Of course you're ambivalent. You always are.”

“OK, you caught me. So what are we going to do.”

“Post it.”

“Aren’t we going to explain what’s going on?”

“I don’t think so. If we keep posting, it will become obvious. If we don’t keep posting then why bother explaining.”

“Makes sense.”

“So?”

“We posted it.”

Getting old is not for sissies

Structure of ibuprofen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought that getting old would be easy to the extent that I thought about it at all. I imagined the “old me” would be just like the “young me” only with gray hair and wrinkles. And I wasn’t all that clear about the wrinkles.

Then I started to get old, and saw things that I had not anticipated. Like deep lines. And sagging flesh. And a mouth that seemed to droop down. Not me at all.

Then I got even older, and discovered things that I hadn’t thought about at all. Like being tired.

Now I knew about being tired, of course. I’d stayed up for 48 hours straight on more than one occasion and, sure, I got tired. But not so tired that I couldn’t gut my way through. Or take a power nap and emerge with enough energy to keep going. And no matter how exhausted I was, I’d be OK after a good night’s sleep. Not perfect, mind you, but OK.

Now I go down to Boston for a weekend and I come back utterly wiped out. It takes days for me to feel that I’ve “recovered.” And by some standard (mine) I’m never quite recovered. Because no matter how much sleep I get, when I wake up I’m never thirty.

Then there’s pain. If you’d have asked me why old people walk slow I’d have answered something vacuous (“Well, they’re old”) or something partly correct (“Well, they’re trying to conserve energy.”) But the number one reason that I’m slowing down these days is pain. The number two reason is fear of injury.

In late July I did something (a few things) that resulted in severe, continuing pain. I compromised my knee and then my back. I spent a few weeks with a significantly lowered IQ, and I think I still have not recovered. And I’m still wary of injuring myself again. So I move slowly.

There’s a feedback effect, of course. If you think slowly then you move slowly. And if you move slowly then you think even more slowly. I think that there is real science that says this, or something like that. If not, there should be, because it’s true.

When you’re young I think almost anything you can reasonably do is beneficial. It’s almost impossible to run fast enough to hurt yourself. You can try to lift the heaviest weight that you can and your muscles will fail (can’t lift more) before your body does (bones break, tendons tear). When you’re old it’s easy to hurt yourself. Running is out because of my knees, and also my back. Walking is possible, but it must be done cautiously, with due attention to how the body is responding, and with ibuprofen beforehand to guard against inflammation.

I thought that getting old would be easy. Turns out that’s not true. It’s a challenge. So I have a choice. Either take the challenge and struggle with the process of aging, or give up.

I accept the challenge. Now it’s time for some ibuprofen and a walk up the hill.

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The Brass Rat

English: 1950 MIT Ring Bezel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apropos of nothing important, but requested by Bobbi to get me back to writing, this story:

MIT’s mascot is the beaver, “nature’s engineer,” and an MIT class ring has an image of a beaver. The ring, usually made of gold is known as a “brass rat.” I didn’t much care about my rat so I gave it to my mother. Who knows where it is now?

MIT tradition has it that you wear your rat with the beaver facing toward you until you graduate, then turn it around so it faces out. The explanation: “Until you graduate, the beaver pisses on you. After you graduate, the beaver pisses on the world.”

Writing mindfully

Repeatedly I say (to anyone who is within range and shows the smallest amount of interest) "I love to write."

Anyone who survives that might then hear me continue to my frustration: "And I don't write. And I don't know why. And I am frustrated."

And if they stick around they'll be subjected to a much longer rant on the unhappiness borne out of my strong desire to write and endless frustration because something, I know not what, gets in the way of writing.

Grr!!!

Occasionally I'll come up with a fix: a solution to the problem of writing. Sometimes nothing comes of the solution. Sometimes it leads to a burst of writing. Eventually the burst ends and frustration sets in.

This might be one of those short-lived fixes. Or it might be different. We'll have to see.

The change comes from a mindfulness practice I'm working on: first becoming aware of myself, and then looking for the "self" of which I am aware.  When I look for the self I find that it disappears. According to generations of teachers of Buddhist-style meditation, that is because the self is an illusion. You'll find that out, they say, if you meditate long enough.

But looking for the self, rather than just meditating is a shortcut that I learned after reading Sam Harris' book "Waking Up." The the difference between a reality and an illusion, Harris says, is this: look at something carefully. If you see more detail, it's probably real. If it vanishes or if it turns into something else, it's probably an illusion.

So me: I look inward for the self, and I find there's nothing there. I'm looking outward instead. No self. Only the present moment. Not even "me" in the present moment.

Just the present moment.

Self appears to be an illusion.

Today I did not simply look for "the self that was aware of itself," but for "the self that wants to write and is frustrated."

And I discovered that there was nothing there.

Nothing wants to write.

Nothing is frustrated that it isn't writing.

There was nothing but the then-present moment.

How can that be any good? If my goal is to write, and the "me" that has that goal disappears taking both its frustration at not writing and its desire to write with it, what then? How can I get myself to write if there's no me that wants to write and no me to be frustrated when it doesn't?

Really!

How can I write when experience has taught me that one of the few ways I can get myself to write is by increasing the frustration that I feel when I don't write? I need to increase my frustration until it is greater than whatever pain I might anticipate that I'd feel if I did write. Then I'll write.

How can I write if I'm not feeling negative feelings that are greater than the negative feelings that stand in the path of writing?

I mean, really!

The answer is: I don't know, but here I am. I've looked for "the part of me that I wants to write." I found nothing. And I'm writing.

Now, in this moment, there's no me that who wants to write.

There's no me that is upset about not writing.

There's nothing but the present moment--and the writing that is in that moment.

I am gone, and all that's left is the writing.