THOUGHTS AT FULL MOON DAY: DAILY CHOICES

I’m sitting here listening to Arcade Fire on my computer. It’s Friday early evening, bright and cold and windy, a very unusual May 24. Tomorrow is full moon, a seriously important day for buddhists, for it’s the day Buddha’s birthday is celebrated all over the Buddhist world.

I’ve been thinking about context and how it affects our perceptions and reactions. I’ve also been marvelling at how it seems possible for me (and I presume this happens to others) to make a problem, or find a problem, however well things are going. Let’s start with that.

 I am just finished with some tight and pressing deadlines and am now in the clear, able to get started on dreaming about and working at my next book project and other ambitions too, from the garden to sketching to seeing neglected friends.

You’d think it would make me feel light and free and very happy. And yes, I felt that way right as soon as the time pressures were over. But then I fell into worrying about what I should do each day. I no longer have the coercion of tight deadlines to keep me moving steadily and methodically from one task to the next. That was survival mode and it worked well.

Now I find myself trying to optimise, because I have the luxury of choice. But it means that I hesitate and get fussed about what I should do first, or whether I should go for a run or do a household errand now and work later or vice versa, and on and on. It’s not very interesting at all. And I’m sorry if this description is tedious. It just seems important to raise this. Is it human nature at work here?

I assume the answer is that I need to impose a structure on myself that resembles the coercive deadline-situation structure. My efforts at optimising are just a way of insisting on exercising moment-to-moment choice. If I could settle into the harness of a structure, it would simplify a lot. And then I wouldn’t be fussing and anxious about my moment to moment decisions.

On the other hand, the unplanned moments of the day, the unfilled spaces, are the fruitful ones, often. They mean there’s room/time to talk to a friend who has a problem, or to daydream my way into a new story idea or a fresh way of seeing a familiar problem. That’s part of my rationale for improvising my schedule through the day.

Another more disciplined way of working would be to cram or jam the work obligations etc into one pre-determined part of the day, a defined chunk of time, thus leaving the ret clear for these other more fluid and open-ended possibilities. I confess that I have never managed, for more than a couple of days at a stretch, to impose “artificial” constraints in that way. I am task driven, rather than structure- or discipline- or rule-driven.

That being the case I need to just chill a little on this pressure to optimise, to forgive myself when the day feels unproductive, and to not have the heightened amped up expectation that every day will be a knock-out.

Is this what growing up is supposed to teach us?

I guess I am stuck in an “optimistic child” mode, where each day or week or month feels full of rich possibility, with elastic time into which can be crammed all sorts of delights. And that’s fine, as long as I don’t get tied up in knots trying to optimise all the time. Rather than focussing on what I don’t get done, I need to move from task to task, without second-guessing myself.

I aked a friend in the market about how he works his way through his days. He’s got some have-to-dos at the start of the day, but then he moves into a mode where he just does whatever chore or task presents itself next, a kind of fluid flow. He doesn’t worry about the decisions, the order in which he does things. And my issue of trying to optimise was a foreign idea to him.

He’s a model to emulate, for sure, in his easy matter-of-fact “enjoy the day as it unfolds” attitude. And he sure is productive, whle making it look effortless.

The other idea I wanted to think about in this post is how context affects perception. It’s a truism, sure, but worth remembering. I started reflecting about it a couple of days ago when the weather suddenly turned extremely cold. In a coat and sweater and scarf and socks and shoes, warm pants too, I still felt assaulted by the cold and wind as I walked outside. I realised that this reaction was just like the one described by winter-hating friends who have never become used to the cold. And yet, if it had been January and the weather had been just the same, I’d have found it balmy, pleasant, a wonderful treat.

This is not about my emotional or intellectual reaction to the cold (though I have to admit that wearing layers of wool on May 24 feels all wrong!). It’s that my body was in another mode, summer mode, and as a result every chilly gust of wind inflicted a kind of pain. In winter we tighten up and brace against the cold, so as not to feel its assault. Without that kind of self-sheilding, we’re vulnerable to it.

And so context is everything. It’s not just about whether the temperature feels cold for this time of year as opposed to January. It’s also about expectations, both emotional and physical. So much of our reactions, physical, emotional, social, is determined by our expectations. Of course this leads me to wander into that whole other realm to do with expectations, which is how we manage ourselves when we have disappointed expectations, because a person or a situation fails to come up our expectations of it.

But that’s for another day…

One thing the hit of cold has done is remind us all what a blessing warmth and sunshine are. And here in Toronto, as I finish this post on Saturday afternoon, the sunshine is beckoning, enticing me outside to beathe in its generosity.

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...