Essay Man
Santa Paula Times, July 10, 2020
by John Nichols
"What I’m Learning"
A year ago I was at the Friends of the Library book sale and one of the volunteers held up a red book and was asking what section to file it under. I opened it randomly and there was a quote by someone with the last name of Nichols. I decided that was enough of a reason to buy the book blindly. When I got it home I noticed that the title was The Secret. It was all about how to get rich. That topic was wasted on spendthrift me but some of the book had spiritual tricks to suggest that I gravitated toward. My favorite was the concept that if you express gratitude for things in your life every day then those things would keep coming into your life. Just express gratitude and sit back and observe the flow.
I started to think about what to express gratitude for in my life every morning as I woke up. I rolled out of bed and just as I put my bare feet onto the carpet the gratitude would flow out of me. Then I go to the bathroom, eat breakfast and read up on all the news.
The morning news fix is often interrupted by my recalling a strange and powerful dream or two. I seem to be dreaming more as the world situation evolves. Some days I don’t remember anything I’ve dreamed. Some days it seems as if a long and powerful dream has just come to an end and the credits are rolling just like a major motion picture and then I wake up. In order to interpret those dreams I apply the principle that every person in my dream is really an unconscious expression of my self. It is not about the self of that strange person in my dream that looks like someone I know personally. That person in my dream is a symbolic representation of some piece of me that my unconscious would like me to observe and consider. To think that my dream is about someone else would be to ignore the hidden message being given to me by my unconscious self. Once I accept that principle I can go about solving the mystery of the dream’s message to my conscious self.
After the last sip of coffee and the reading of a final tweet on my iPad I move downstairs to spend time alone with my exercises. Since everybody is unique, each individual can cobble together their own set of activities. Regularly repeating good activities builds strength and character and heals. Repeating poor behavior builds up a bunch of barriers in your mind, body and spirit to healthy growth and a good life. Take your choice. In my case shoulder exercise chose me. I had rotator cuff surgery and that requires that I pull down on a huge rubber band to exercise my shoulders and keep flexibility. They still crunch a bit when I move them but I have regained full mobility. My lower back is also a weak point and the various stretching exercises I have assembled reduce that pain. It comes and goes even with those exercises.
Some of my daily exercises were received from a physical therapist after a surgery. Others I got out of an ebook on yoga I checked out for free from the Blanchard Community Library website. All I needed was my library card number. Another bit of advice came from Robin Briceño who was teaching a free virtual yoga class for the Santa Paula Art Museum. I talked to her after one of her classes and told her I used my own combination of yoga and physical therapy. She advised me that an important thing to do was to focus on the breath. What a concept. That changed the way I do a lot of things. I used to get into a stretching position and hold it and count to 20, or 10 or 5 depending on the exercise. At Robin’s suggestion I started counting my breath to measure the duration of the exercise. I’d get into position and then take a deep breathe in through the nose. Then I would let it out through the mouth sort of like blowing through a straw. And count 1. Repeat and count 2 and so on for the desired time. Concentrating on the breath is one of the key elements of yoga and a lot of other things in life. I estimate that counting breaths up to 5 is about the same as holding a position and counting from 1 to 20. That 5 breath duration is close enough for physical and spiritual growth and builds mindfulness 12 ways, or so the ads say.
I am learning to meditate. I have not learned. I’m never going to learn it. I’m content with just keeping on learning. What I’m becoming aware of is that a daily practice of your own choosing can be helpful in a lot of ways. I’ve seen suggestions that people meditate for 2 minutes a day. I like 10 minutes. Some talk about 20 minutes and contemplate working up to one hour a day or more. Longer is not better and shorter is not easier. I wanted to meditate and got an app called Headspace a few years ago. That talked me through a learning curve. After a while I got the point and unsubscribed and got another app called Insight Timer. I set the timer for 10 minutes. A gong goes off at the beginning and a gong goes off at the end. Bong. I breath in through the nose and breath out through the mouth and count to 20 and repeat. All the while distractions keep floating through my head space like clouds in the sky. OK. Let them float by and I’ll go back to focusing on my breath until the next distraction and the next. After a few months I don’t care, I just breathe.
Then I try to take a walk. Try as I can I can not walk every day. Most days or even some days are what I have to take. Life gets in the way of preserving my life through exercising my heart and lungs. Meditation and my journal are daily. Walking and other exercising are squeezed in to preserve my health and sanity. I also use walking to tune up my powers of observation. I walk in silence, no ear buds and podcasts, and observe the sights and sounds of my neighborhood. I see who else is walking. Some walk whenever I walk and some I only see once and never again. I measure my observation skills by how many coins I find on the street. I find them all the time. Many times they are run over and scuffed up but sometimes mint. I even find credit cards. After I find a coin I try not to keep my head pointed down on the street for the rest of the walk looking for the next coin. I raise up my eyes to the horizon and the sky and focus on the awareness of the day in front of me.
Lately I’ve been feeling my age and also staying at home more. I work less and have more free time. That means I am free to nap in the afternoon if I feel like it. I feel like it a lot lately. I’m finding that my body tells me that one hour is about right. Any longer and I’m groggy and it does not seem like I fully wake up. Before and after a nap I read. Exercise, read, work, eat lunch, read, nap, read, get ready for dinner. What a day. Not recommended for everybody or even for me every day but it’s a rhythm. I can feel the beat.
I keep a journal. It’s sort of like a diary but not. I think of a diary as a record of the activities of the day. My grandmother kept a small diary every day and it now rests in the family archives. A typical entry would be, “Got up. Went to the market, Wrote Xmas cards. Had dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed.” That certainly was a record of her day’s activities but we don’t know what she was feeling or thinking or learning from her experiences. Those remained hidden in her head unless she cared to share them. I keep what I call a journal that I write in every day just before dinner. I sit down and start writing about what feelings and challenges and successes I had during the day. I do not even expect to go back and read what I write. I just write. I let it flow without censoring myself or aiming for quality in writing. Writing is a mental, emotional and spiritual exercise. As with any exercise it is the repetition that benefits one. I don’t try to be a better writer. I only let if flow. By letting the words flow I learn about myself and my world.
As I live through some days I get frustrated and anxious about my behavior and performance. Things don’t seem to be going as smoothly as I’d like. I’m kicking myself and complaining about every little thing. Then at the end of the day as I write in my journal and look back and forward I usually write down that it was a pretty good day after all. Then I can use the journal to analyze my behavior and actions and improve myself at about the same pace that I can build strength and flexibility from my morning stretching exercises. I’m reminded to learn and grow by repeating good behavior without effort and observing the results. I learn to be a better observer by surrounding myself with art, music and writing.
And food. And cocktails. That comes next. At the beginning of the dinner hour I like to have one cocktail. I chill the glass and usually stir the ingredients. I study the history of food and cocktails to make myself a better participant in the experience. Then I chop garlic and onions for chef Leslie. You can’t believe how much better an onion chopper I am than when I started chopping decades ago. I was sloppy at first and almost cut my fingers off at times. I did not quit. I continued to chop and chop and chop. I did not try harder. I repeated and repeated and repeated and got better and better and better. It’s the pedagogy of repetition.
Bon Appetit.
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