OVER-ANTICIPATION; WHAT ABOUT LIVING THE NOW?

It's just past midnight on Friday night. I meant to be in bed before now, but somehow... You know how these things can go, I'm sure.

This last week as I've been going places on my bicycle in the slightly warmer weather, rather than walking, life has taken on a whole new rhythm. And it's forced me to realise how much time I spend anticipating, rather than being in the moment. The most basic kind of anticipation, for me, is when I know I have to be somewhere at say ten o'clock, to meet someone or for an appointment, and that commitment becomes a big obligation in my head, one that I work to not mess up. "Messing up" means being late or forgetting whatever it is that I'm supposed to bring with me or remember. And so as a result I spend an undue amount of time making sure I have what I need, and then leaving way too early so as to be sure I'm not late.

How silly is that? And if I am going to wherever it is on foot, then there's an even larger chunk of time lost. But now, on the bicycle, I can leave at the relatively last minute and still make it to a meeting or whatever on time. No waiting for the streetcar, no half-hour walks...

The other day when I found myself leaving home late and still, after zipping along the busyness of College Street on my newly refurbished bicycle, five minutes early to meet a friend, I realised that I need and want to change my mental patterns and habits. I want to shed this sense of, yes, let's name it, this sense of urgency I have that makes me try to anticipate the future so "nothing goes wrong". It's ridiculous to be so bound up anticipating that the things I want or need to do right now don't get attended to. And I think it's pretty destructive too, in the long run.

I suppose it's some kind of control issue, do you think? And perhaps underlying it is an anxiety? Sounds about right.

As I was out for my run this morning (now there's something I don't have to think about ahead, just do!) I found myself trying to imagine how I would go about changing this pattern of over-anticipating. It seems to me that I need to look at what I am protecting myself against by doing all this obsessive anticipating. Is it the "dreadfulness" of being a few minutes late? of forgetting something and having to fix it later? So what? The world will not come to an end, after all, if I am late. So why am I acting as if it might?

The prescription, I think, and here I must apologise ahead of time to friends, is to deliberately try to stop caring about my own punctuality. I need to figure out how to let go of this thing. hmm

And if I aggravate some people by being late, well, it's not intentional, not directly. It's just part of my trying to learn how to live in the present more reliably. For as things are now, I feel I'm always struggling in the present to ensure that things go well later on in the day. But in all that anticipating the "now" gets lost. I've come to realise that this is why I often have extremely unproductive mornings (apart from my run and often some cleaning up). I can't seem to settle down to work because I'm thinking ahead to things I have committed to that are scheduled for later in the day.

Talk about fruitless.

This is an odd post. I'm not sure If I'll publish it or not. I'll just go back and have a reread, and then decide.

Before I do I should tell you that I did have a breakthrough today: I printed out new versions of all my Burma book chapters, and now have an updated hard copy of all my recipes to make notes on. It feels great. I can't work from the computer when I'm in the kitchen. It's just not the same as scribbling a note in pen on a piece of paper (usually the page the draft recipe is on).

Today I made the simple and magical sweet that is traditional in Burma at this Water Festival (next weekend) time of year. It's a rice dumpling, rice dough wrapped around palm sugar, then boiled until translucent and tender (they look like peeled lychees). When you bite in, the sugar inside is molten, smoky-tasting, and shockingly good. Aha!

I also made new supplies of pantry staples that I'll need for testing in the next couple of weeks, things like roasted rice powder, fluffy dried shrimp, roasted chopped peanuts, fried shallots, etc.

Armed with these I should be able to keep my momentum.

Once on-task and with a list of recipes to test, i hope I can avoid too much over-anticipating and keep my brain and ambition focussed on the immediate "things to do".

WIsh me luck!

And if you see me pedaling past quickly on my red Diamond Back, you'll know that I've managed to cut things fine, and now am hurrying to make up for not having anticipated!

GETTING FREE OF OLD PATTERNS THAT BIND

There’s something heavy about birthdays, for me. Mine is this week, so that’s why they’re on my mind. It’s not the simple fact of a marker for time passing, aging, whatever, it’s the expectations that can come along with. As a child I just looked forward to that feeling of celebration, and a day of specialness. As an adult with kids of my own, I still find myself wanting to make the day of my birthday glow in some way. Last year I became obsessed with wanting to swim in fresh water, specifically in the Gatineau River, on my birthday, and it actually happened, thanks to the tolerance and generosity of Dom and Tashi and of friends in the Gatineau.

But having a fixed notion of what will make a day special is not a good idea. It’s bound to lead to disappointments and letdowns. The whole thing is a very small illustration of the truth of Buddha’s insight that attachment leads to suffering, in this case attachment to an idea or a plan, which if the thing doesn’t go as planned, leads to disappointment.

As my birthday has approached this year, I’ve tried not to fall into the anticipatory planning trap. It’s been a struggle. I’ve played around with ideas for a trip, with other wish-list possibilities, going over and over, rolling things around in my mind, visualising again and again various scenarios. It’s felt like a trap. And that realisation has forced me confront my tendency to be overly anticipatory.

I recently learned a term for this way of being: min-maxing. A min-maxer works hard to minimise the bad outcomes and maximise the good (= desired by me) outcomes. This involves a lot of anticipatory thinkng and planning. In struggling against the birthday optimisation urge, I’ve come to see what a waste of energy this min-maxing can be when it takes over. In other words, yes, fine, try to anticipate outcomes and avoid pitfalls, but don’t obsess and go back and forth over possibilities searching for the absolute best strategy. It’s such an uninteresting process. I guess that’s true of any repetitive or obsessive thinking or behaviour...

And so this birthday has become another opportunity to learn about letting go. In this case, it’s letting go of a whole pattern of thinking, so results are patchy!

As I was out in the garden this morning, clearing out overgrown this and that, I got started on the bindweed. Perhaps you know it, an attractive vine with small morning glory-like white flowers. But beware! For it survives by winding itself round and round other plants as it grows, strangling (“binding”) them. As I started pulling tenacious lengths of it off the delphiniums and up off the ground, I wondered how often bindweed has been used as a metaphor in sermons and talks of all kinds.

Like my min-maxing, bindweed seems attractive/useful/a good thing at first with its twining stems and pretty flowers, but then can get a stranglehold, suffocating other more tender plants, just as min-maxing closes off freer and more imaginative and engaged thoughts.

Hmmm the gardener’s musings. That time working in the morning cool is precious, wonderfully unstructured and freeing. And afterward, this morning, the garden did indeed look clearer and airier, freed up; the gardener needed a shower!

Now it’s just after ten in the morning and already the “heat bugs” are doing their whining whirr , the air is heavy, the sky thickening with cloud: it’s really summer. Yesterday I picked my first ripe cherry tomato, and a few days before that the first cucumber, sweet and juicy.

The tomato is from a plant that is growing upside-down, that is, it is in a large plastic bucket (with a handle) hanging from a hook out back. The bucket is full of soil (and can be watered from above of course); the plant emerges from a hole in the bottom of the bucket. It’s a great solution for gardeners who don’t have enough space, or who have infections in their soil or a problem with rodents or other vegetable predators. I have squirrels who like to take bites out of the tomatoes, and last year had a problem with blight in that rainy summer we had. (This year I’m trimming off any branches that look like they might touch the ground (blight is earthborn), hoping to avoid infection.)

This plant was given to me by Potz, at 4-Life, who is experimenting with bucket growing (hanging garden) techniques this year. (In return I gave him a small curry leaf plant, that I had separated off from a larger plant; they are wonderfully aromatic and of course an essential in many south Asian dishes, live indoors in winter (when they are prone to infestations, I admit) and then go outdoors in a sheltered dappled-shade spot for the summer.) One of the interesting things about hanging plants is that they still try to grow upward, to the light and away from gravity, which gives them an attractive arching upward shape, fanlike, below the bucket. It’s fine for cherry tomatoes, which are not that heavy, so the branches will hold them just fine, but I’m not sure how well it would work with heavy luscious beefsteaks or other full-sized tomatoes...

Do write to me if you want to try it next year. The main advice, apart from starting with good soil enriched with some aged manure, is to make sure you have a place to hang the bucket(s) before you plant. Once the plant is the bucket and sticking out the hole in the bottom, there’s no way you can put the bucket down!! It has to hang. If you doing a bunch of them, the ideal arrangment is to have a strong metal pole on which you can put hooks for the buckets.

Speaking of predators in the vegetable garden reminds me that we have acquired a professional pest controller. And it shows: our mouse problem (chewing sounds in the night in the kitchen area, the occasional sighting, and of course mouse poop here and there) has vanished. Thank-you Silky! Silky is a mouser, whom we are taking care of for a year while her regular family is away. She’s quiet, independent and un-needy, and best of all, effective! We’ve also realised that Silky is a guard cat, fiercely defending the house against other cats who might want to come in. We’re thinking of hiring her out as a consultant and teacher...