The Forever Loop

This week I’ve been working on a tutorial for children that teaches them how to code with Scratch, a programming language developed by MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group. The rudimentary algorithm puts an animated cat into a loop that repeats forever, running back and forth across a beach.

This image is now etched in my brain and calls up memories from my many summers walking the mile long length of beach outside our family cottage. There was so much emotional chaos in our household, but once I started walking that beach I knew that no one would come and get me. So began my own journey in the forever loop of reparative escape. I’m feeling more and more, recently, that this escape is mostly giving strength and presence to the chaos. What does it matter if I spend two hours in a state of flowing electric bliss if I can barely muster the energy and motivation to do the dishes?

What would it take to switch the parameters and default settings so that I would be in a forever loop of thriving, growing powerful calm, like the ocean waves I assimilated on those walks? What would I have to repeat every day to be in a forever loop of focus, order, and peace in my physical and emotional environment? I know it’s possible, I know there’s a path there, but I can’t seem to stay on it. Why?

In the last week, I’ve been revisiting the practice of opening various “energy gates” in my body. The plan is to spend three days at each gate. There are too many to name here, but I’ve been working through the first two, the crown and the third eye area, and on Saturday morning I started meditating on the area behind the eyeballs. I did a bit of research on the anatomy of the eyes and learned that there are two important points, the macula, which modulates our sharp forward-looking focus and the optic nerve through which information travels from the eye to the brain.

Another algorithm I’ve been working for the kids is a reset sequence. Something that will return the Sprite to its default position whenever it goes off the grid or gets stuck. Center stage, eyes facing forward, 90-degree angle to the x plane. I don’t know the answer to the above questions, beyond pressing my own mental reset button, stabilizing my vision and starting once again.

Small actions, many times. That is the pith instruction that was handed down to Mingyur Rinpoche from his father, it’s one that I have a very hard time believing in, but when my life returns to the default state of chaos, it’s the only thing that helps me make my way out. This week I will go about remembering the one-two or one-two-three sequences in my life. Gathering, washing and drying the dishes. Choosing and clearing a hotspot. Setting a timer and picking up stuff off the floor. Perhaps the greatest challenge for me is to keep it small and to feel the moment of having finished.

Happiness is....

According to Mathieu Ricard in Happiness:  "a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.  This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being.  Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may  be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it."

This has been the most stressful year of my life and I'm not out of the woods yet.

But I can get out.

I will get out because I have such a fantastic skill with standing.  It is the fundamental skill of happiness.  It is the path to the flourishing sense of well being that Mathieu Ricard talks about.

Most of my life has been about acquiring knowledge.  My mother was a professor, my father a journalist.  That's the way I was raised.  I've never really thought about acquiring skills as a value.  It was all about acquiring knowledge.

But programming has changed that.

I feel the flourishing of knowledge as I do this.  Just as I have felt the flourishing of peace when I commit to standing.

I will get out.

Because when you have a  healthy mind you see the patterns.  You see the right patterns.  You see what needs to be done and you do it.

Back To Standing

I'm back. 

The desire to stand has returned, now that my financial stress is somewhat buffered by the deal with my landlady.  I'm still anxious about my financial future, but I can pay my rent.  Or rather, won't have to pay my rent this summer, and next.

More and more when I hear that nagging question "what do I want more than anything in the world" the answer I am giving is "well-being".  I want wellbeing for myself, for Ben, for my family, and for everyone.   I want to be well and I want to live in a world where people can be well.   I can't force them to be well, but I can help them to be well.   And I can only do that if I am well myself.

Last week I started a course on Human Computer Interaction.  Our first assignment is called needfinding.    It's a wonderful assignment because not only does it direct my attention to other people's needs, I realize that in identifying the needs of others we are often alerting ourselves to our own needs. 

This is what I want to do from now on:

Build software that will prompt me to change my habits to create well being.

Build software that will prompt me to stand.

Can I accept my present as it is right now?

Messy kitchen. Economic uncertainty. My mother ill. Dripping toilet. Court case pending. Can I accept this?

I don't want to. I want instead to drift off into fantasies about starting a coding camp for kids, becoming a local celebrity on French radio, or how much better things might be if I changed my colour palette. I want to escape into nostalgia about Whitney Houston who died two days ago, at 48. She was born a week and a day after me. To think you can have beauty, talent, skill, wealth beyond your wildest dreams. You can sing the American anthem with such joy and freedom, better than anyone ever has and probably ever will. And still you can be so miserable and self destructive.

I have only a fraction of the things I wanted when I was twenty and Whitney Houston was just becoming a star. But today I'm alive. I have food. I am reasonaby healthy. I'm addicted to misery, maybe, but not really anymore to the things that cause misery. And today I have the wisdom to sit with this misery and watch it shift into peace, if I can keep my commitment to mindfulness.

As for the circumstances in my life. I can accept everything, except the debt. I can live with being forced to move, if it comes to that. My parents will die. As will I. I know I can get the kitchen together. But the debt. What am I going to do about that? That's something I need to sit with a bit.

Liberation

Last few days, and even right now, have been high stress. Court, financial crisis, transitional time. It's all scary stuff.

But there is something deeper I think that I have to deal with. An undermining energy. A fundamental lack of compassion for myself. I have not been taking the actions needed to protect myself from this situation. I have not been acting responsibly.

There's a part of me that wants to blame this on ZZ. That wants to say, look: ZZ has not solved all your problems. You have still made some bad decisions. But that's not ZZs fault. I abandonned that. It didn't abandon me.

It's T.V.. Internet surfing. Internet buying that have been leading me around like a lost dog looking for my owner. And I have been passively allowing that to happen.

Yeah, I need to sit down and make realistic getting money plans right now.

But on the plus side, at least I don't need a lot of money.

indescribable marvels

My practice fluctuates like winter and summer between periods where I'm feeling amazing surges of energy and periods where I seem to have incrementally returned to where I set out from, a place of rigidity where the sap is thin.

Often my thin sap days are because I'm growing in a different area of my life. Right now, for instance, I've started learning computer programming and I'm more than a little obsessed with all the places that might lead me. Maybe I'll start a meet up for teenagers at the RPM center. Maybe this will turn into a business where I run after school programs.Maybe I'll start a career as a tech journalist. Maybe I'll design a course to teach at Dawson.

All these maybes. None of them right now have standing like a tree in the centre of that action. None of them involve keeping a space for the indescribable marvels that I can experience now.

I can't force myself to care about Zhang Zhuan. But I can break the infinite excitement loop to keep my feet on the ground. Otherwise I'm just giving away all my energy for free. And then I'm sapped.

my life has changed

It hit me this morning that early morning rising will always be a habit for me now. Even when it's not. This is really what my mind needs and even if I fall off the path, I know I'm going to wind up here again. This early morning time, watching the sun rise, feeling the energy grow in my body and in my brain. Cultivating a center of my identity in my gut. All that is my true home. And because I know that I will always be secure.

the growth forest

It's been about a month since I started this commitment to early morning zz and regular writing about it.

I expected change. I expected a steady a progress of building of chi. But, of course, that's not exactly what happened.

I've made some progress, but I've also experience what I supposed would call setbacks, but are merely the psychic knots of energy that always arise to undermine my practice if I choose to allow them to drive me.

Simply making the tension go away is not really the strategy that feels right. Just being with it, just knowing the familiar pattersn and getting up and standing anyways, even when I can barely focus on the changing light, let alone my tan tien.

Being with them, familiarizing myself with them is the first step, I hope, to loosening their hold. Yesterday for instance I sat with all the anxiety I've been feeling about this decision to send my son to a more challenging school against the advice of a young neuropsychologist. I still don't know if it's the right decision. He had a rough first year, but he seems to be doing better, making friends and enjoying the school. But we need to ask for services and its possible the school board will find out about the recommendation I ignored.

So there's the whole mix of anxiety, and guilt and possible shame, that is really as much about my own bad school experiences as my son's. I don't know what to do anymore except sit with it. Acknowledge that there is this whole nest of anxieties and I don't know where they started, where or if they will ever end. But they're there and they will probably return. And the best I think I can hope for in my project to "change" is to be more aware of them. To be able to continue working on my well being and be able to say, yes those are my school neurosis returning. Oh well. I'm going to stand and hope for the best, and do what I can.

It's not this steady progression of energy and power. It's more like being confronted by the fact that before you can renovate, first you need to toss all the junk in the basement.