How to control time

Having a meeting at noon structures the rest of your day. Usually in a grid-like calendar format where you schedule travel time, lunch, and your work activities before or after. Paper or electronic systems all support this format of booking your day.

What if that grid didn't exist? What if that noon meeting was just a point in your day without any other type of anchoring? No gridlines to put 1/2 hour or 1 hour long calls, meetings, and tasks. Just a blank before and after. How would your day change?

How your environment can enable or disable you

Camping in the woods, away from urban convenience, requires effort that comes very naturally. You're on the sun's clock while hiking and you have to set camp before nightfall. Putting up the tent, starting a fire, cooking food, even going to the bathroom are all laborious tasks. They seem ingrained though. They don't seem like work when they're necessary.

I struggled with the concept of being mindful in nature while on a 3-day hike through the Grand Canyon. Nature requires mindfulness at all times. You don't force attention to the moment or feel you are judging the moment when the environment is set up for you to be attentive every step of the way. 

Just being is easier. 

It's not about the lack of distractions either. It's all the needs you have regularly being fulfilled simply by where you are that moment. The views are spectacular and entertaining, you're exploring the unknown feeling a sense of adventure, the exploration itself is a workout and communication with others is focused though light and fun. The labor that goes into living is just that, no less no more. 

Oddly, the feeling that the environment can enable you reminds me of a video about a blind Ugandan lawyer who talks about one's environment disabling them. It's fascinating. 

How resilient are you?

Amishi Jha expertly explains how we assign value judgments to daily events can impact our ability to respond to stress. Building our meta-awareness through mindfulness can help us become more resilient to what life throws our way. Short, sweet and to the point, she brings to the forefront our automatic reactions to stress and how we can manage them. 

The details of this program and the full presentation can be found here. 

How to be (and stay) in the moment

The moment I think I am in the moment I am instantly out of it. Because I am thinking now, not experiencing. I am forced back into my mind because I have cut the chord to the natural experience simply happening without my thinking mind. Instead of being in the experience, I am back to thinking about the experience.

It's very frustrating. It's why you cannot describe the benefit of meditation or mindfulness easily. It's an experience not the description of an experience. When the description, the knowledge, the recognition of the experience comes to mind, it's gone. Because now your mind is centered on thinking about it, not doing it.

To go back into the experience once you have recognized it is also difficult. Because now you have created an expectation. You think you know what it feels like. The main problem is "you think," when you can "just know." The last quoted phrase is the trigger: "just know" or "just be." It shifts thinking into the present experience.

Thinking is noise when you are experiencing. When you are thinking, thinking alone is the experience. Your body will continue breathing as long as there is air. You will continue talking as long as there is a listener. You will work as long as there is a project at hand. One does not exist without the other. Action arises from need and you just do it. Thinking about it only gets in the way.

Just breathing

We think we breathe when without oxygen breathing would not be possible. We take it for granted that our bodies are in control of our breath. But what if we were on another planet or in space?

Both our bodies and our environment are necessary for breathing to exist. This is no breather without the right air and there is no breath without the person taking in the air. There is only breathing, which requires both the body and the air.

This occurs to me especially when I am focusing on my breathing during meditation. Just watching, listening, paying attention to my body taking one breath at a time. I assume I am in control. The equation is very direct at first: my body breathes the air around it.

Then slowly I become removed from the equation because the breathing does not stop. How can it? My body will simply breathe because of the air around it. You can't have one without the other. I am not truly in control of my breath, it's involuntary and only possible because there is oxygen in the air.

There is just breathing.

How to be more patient

It's difficult to be patient. When you're trying to get somewhere, the last thing you want to do is wait.

When are you not trying to get somewhere though? We are always on the move, so where does impatience come in?

You can't beat time. How you get there determines who you are when you get there.

Impatience can be very selfish because we assume control over the end result. In our rush and foot-tapping, we think we can control time. The funny thing is if we get there and the other person is running late, it all feels for not. And now it's hard to wait once again.

You can't try being more patient if you're prone to impatience though. It makes no logical sense to wait when waiting is what's bugging you. Set your clock ahead, keep a good book with you, check traffic well in advance. Each trick will help but in the end it is just a trick that doesn't tackle the root problem.

What happens when you become impatient? Why are you so annoyed? What is it you are rushing towards? Do you feel like your circumstances got the better of you? Will the person waiting for you not understand? What is really making you angry?

Next time you feel impatient, ask yourself why. The answers are personal to how you deal with things out of your control. No one can understand what triggers you react to but yourself.

Spend time to make time

When you spend time meditating, you get back even more quality time. It's similar to the adage that you have to spend money to make money. When you're busy, booked and overwhelmed, making time to meditate is the last thing on your mind. But what if it adds more focused time in your day?

Meditation may seem like a strange investment at first. Sitting on the floor, in a chair, on a couch closing your eyes and focusing on your breath can sound like a waste of time when you think about it. Don't think about it. Do it. Only then it will become clear why it gives back more time than it takes.

Just start one day. Any time. Anywhere. Focus on your breath. Focus on a word. Focus on an image. Choose one thing and only one thing and concentrate on it. Let everything else go. Watch your thoughts float on by. Stay with what you chose. 

What's the point? The focus itself. Distractions are always tempting. Social media, email, instant messenger, podcasts, unread articles, are all waiting all the time. When distraction becomes a habit, loss of focus is the first to give. They're opposites on a balance beam with you in the middle.  

Finding time to focus means regaining focused time. There is no way to know until you try meditation. There is plenty of evidence to support that meditation improves focus, but you would only be reading again, not practicing the thing that can help you. Find out by doing it yourself.

How to be present when you don't like the present

Why would you want to be in the moment if it's not to your liking? What's the benefit of being fully engaged?

It's telling though, isn't it, when you don't like your present moment? You question why you're in it to begin with. You wonder how you can get out of it. How you can change it.

What can you do to want to be more in the moment? By simply informing you of your present, whether good or bad, mindfulness is letting you know something is up.

With this self-awareness, you're given a choice. You can change your circumstances or accept them. Either way, you're more present, more there, in the moment than you were before.

Ray Bradbury once said, "Love what you do and do what you love." It's kind of a Zen koan when you think about it. 

Good writing

Patriotism's failings belie the unity felt during war, echoed in raw tones within this LIFE magazine article published on September 20th, 1943.

"Here lie three Americans. What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country? Why print this picture anyway of three American boys, dead on an alien shore? The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. 

And so here it is. This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns. The camera doesn’t show America and yet here on the beach is America, three parts of a hundred and thirty million parts, three fragments of that life we call American life: three units of freedom. So that it is not just these boys who have fallen here, it is freedom that has fallen. It is our task to cause it to rise again."

The above quote is narrated here, creating the expected somber aura though with an inescapable hopefulness.