Like a Sunrise

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Do the negative things we think make us grouchy? When we’re grouchy, do we show it? When we’re hopeful and loving, do we show it?

Negative thoughts don’t just happen, do they? When you get a negative idea, does it originate inside you, or does it first start somewhere else and then grow inside you as you think about it? When you entertain a downer idea, do you feed that idea? Feed it with more thoughts like it? But then where do those thoughts come from? Are they inside you already, or are they born from the first idea? Do thoughts breed? Can they reproduce? Can ideas germinate? Pollinate? Can you weed the garden of your mind? How does that work? And is it fun work? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could see it as a thrill to remove a negative thought from our mental vocabulary? Double positive! You would get to the way of optimistic thinking and have fun doing it!

Where do positive thoughts originate? In Hell or Heaven? If there was no positive thinking, would there be no Heaven? If there was no negative thinking, would there be no Hell? If there was no life on Earth, would there be no “sunrise”? Would there be no morning? If there was no songbird, would there be no music? Would there be no “nature”? Aren’t you glad there is nature, a songbird, a sunrise, and a morning?

Gratitude comes from somewhere. Where does gratitude originate? Is it in the recognition of our need? Is it in the realization of what exists? Do we see the alternative? Do we recognize all of these at once? Do we see our need for the thing, recognize that it exists, and focus on the fact that the alternative isn’t with us? For instance, is gratitude for the songbird because a person needs to hear the tune, finds gladness in the existence of the beautiful song, and is appreciative that the bird doesn’t sound like a crow? Gaakh! What if all birds sounded like crows? Gaakh! Gaakh! Then along came a new species, a bird that whistled in more than one tone? The birth of the new species would be like sunrise after a long, cold night.

At least, for the person who needed the song, it would be like sunrise. What if you somehow started to love the sound of crows? Then would the birth of the songbird feel as if it was the sign of the end for the crows? Could a person grow attached to their sorrows? Could a person feel needful toward negative thinking? What happens when you get there, to the point where your negative thoughts are like part of your essential being? Would weeding the mental garden feel more like amputation? Would you get all positive, but not even recognize your new optimistic self?

The point, of course, is just how deeply do you allow yourself to go into those negative thought waters? How weedy do you let the garden get? If you continually loved the darkness, would you eventually dislike the sunrise? Does pessimism really love itself? By definition, it wouldn’t act in self-love. Pessimism is self-loathing. Optimism is at least hopeful toward oneself.

Gratitude, then, is like the knowledge of a sunrise. It’s appreciation and expectation all wrapped up in one. Gratitude is a characteristic of the optimistic.

Bobsled: Last Great Ride of the Season

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The last great ride of the season. Mountain biking is my favorite method of meditation. If I had video, you’d probably wonder how anyone could really meditate while going that fast around the variety of obstacles and challenges: trees, boulders, mud…

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…natural and man-made ramps…

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…and abandoned cars.

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How does someone meditate in the face of physical action? You might ask such a question. And I might turn it around and ask, “How can you not?”

This one is called Bobsled. It’s a swooping downhill section of a series of trails. The swoops and the jumps all encourage a rider to go fast. If you’ve ever felt out of control, even in a familiar situation, then you’ll have an idea of how this one feels.

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Bobsled is named well. It truly feels and looks like a bobsled track.

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At the bottom there are some abandoned cars with dirt ramped up next to a few of them so you can jump over them, if you felt the urge. (Yes, I did.)

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Well, it was fun. As you can see, the trail even has some photogenic appeal in the fall with multi-colored leaves blowing around everywhere. Soon it will be covered in snow, and if I want to ride I’ll have to go to Mexico. (There’s poetry in there somewhere. No, I didn’t.)

Until then, here’s cheers to Bobsled!

Sleep

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Sometimes we say, “I should have stayed in bed.” Of course, many of us don’t mean it as if we should sleep. Whether we’re thinking of laying around watching television, or listening to music, or playing video games, we usually use the phrase in a general I’d-rather-be-doing-something-else way. The feeling is that something in the day has gone wrong and we’d rather start over. We’d rather have not even started.

Who knows? Staying in bed might be a good idea every once in a while to evade the pitfalls of life. How many pitfalls, calamities, and collisions can one person encounter in a life anyway? To avoid a couple of mishaps in one day among a year’s-worth of days sounds like a necessary principle. Everyone should have a day off from those events which make a person say, “I should have stayed in bed.”

Now, all this is not a dismissal of anyone who can’t get sleep. The insomniacs are out there, among society, and we should pity them. The poor, saggy-eyed, sleepless vampires are too far gone to be able to think coherently. They will say, “I should have stayed in bed,” and mean something completely different from the majority. They mean SLEEP! They mean: “I should have stayed asleep,” which never seems to happen for them. It’s their personal fantasy.

The sleepless make grouchiness look like innocence. An insomniac can get ornery because their mind is easily frustrated. They may find problems with everyone they meet. An insomniac will be judgy. They don’t necessarily want to be judgy even though it might seem that way. They really wish for everyone to get along. The insomniac wishes for world peace as much as they wish for inner peace.

The sleepless wish a bed had “majiks” inside to drag them down into a world of dreams. They wish for a slumber which satisfies. They wish for true sleep, the likes of which others take for granted. The insomniacs wish for a sleep which lasts long enough to make the hands on the clock move, otherwise they might wake up and it’s still the same time of day. They wish for deep sleep like deep darkness, like a consuming force which can overcome the adrenalin and the racing thoughts, like a smothering blanket inside the mind to choke out any repetitive scenarios.

An insomniac, if found with the day’s scenarios on the brain, will replay those scenarios until all sanity is debatable and all sleep is beyond capture.

A person on little sleep might begin typing and come up with something that looks like thisalkdas, because their head tilted forward while their hands were still on the akeyboardaljf. No need to proofread that stuff. Just get the typist some sleep. Have them start over tomorrow.

Tell them: “You should have stayed in bed.”

Traditions to Keep and Traditions to Lose

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Not all traditions are worth keeping. Some are good for the soul. Some traditions bring only temporary happiness. Some are horrible to everyone involved. For a tradition to be worth keeping, it has to have some lasting merit.

There’s a simple tradition in my family of handing out candy on Halloween while watching a movie. This is the most innocuous example of any tradition, right? The idea of watching a movie, usually a horror flick, while passing around candy on the night of the dead is fairly harmless. You could dig deeper and say the merits of a horror flick are debatable. You could even say the act of giving children candy is terrible for their teeth. Chances of drawing a massive stir among society over these arguments would be small. Few people would really care, or see either dilemma as a life-shattering tradition. A viewer of the horror-show will rarely enact what they’ve seen on the screen, and children who eat candy can always brush their teeth. The true dilemma in that last one is whether or not the parents are teaching their children to brush.

A less innocuous tradition is that of the late-night prank. Harmless, usually, it does however have the potential to scar the victim mentally.

One time, a few years ago, there was an old man who lived near me. He seemed stable enough in his mental capacity. He seemed mellow. Halloween was near, but this old man didn’t decorate. He hadn’t answered the door on previous Halloweens, if he was even home. Possibly he left home for the night. It was also possible he was watching a movie like me, except without handing out candy. No harm in his tradition whatsoever.

Another tradition had inserted itself in the days prior to our beloved spook night and the other tradition was even spookier than death…it was political posturing time. Signs for the various parties and the names of people who represented were planted on lawns next to fake cardboard gravestones. The comparison was too obvious.

My mischievous mind couldn’t handle the pressure. I had seen the political signs go up nearly a month earlier and thought the political decorations were uglier and more sinister than life-like zombies posed in leaf piles. That night, I collected all the political signs within five blocks of my house…about a dozen of them…then I transplanted them to the old man’s front lawn.

The next day I saw all of the signs scattered in the road. It looked like he had ripped them up and thrown them out there in anger and frustration. Although it wasn’t my intention to upset the old man, it seems that’s what happened. So even though there’s a small part of my mind still finding humor over his reaction, I can’t help but put myself in his mind and think maybe he found the signs as a direct assault, not as a harmless prank. Lesson learned.

A more positive prank I did the same Halloween: I collected a bunch of basketballs from the lost and found from the rec. center by telling them I was going to donate them to a group of young men. I gathered Sharpies. I drew Jack-o-lantern faces on all the basketballs and put all of them (about twenty basketballs) in black plastic bags. Late that night, long after the signs went in the old man’s yard, I carried the black plastic bags as if I was some demented Santa Claus. I went to another neighbor’s house where the family who lived there had two teenage boys. They also had a basketball hoop next to their driveway. I put all the basketballs in their front yard with the Jack-o-lantern faces visible.

It was a couple of weeks later when one of the boys told me the story of how someone had left a bunch of basketballs on their lawn on Halloween. He also said his family had to throw away most of the basketballs because they were flat, but there were some that still held air. I didn’t offer him any clue to who might have left all those basketballs, but it was a good feeling to know one prank went right.

The Hidden Benefits of Technology

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Google Maps may be alleviating traffic. Have you ever used it to find the fastest route to your destination? Here’s how it works: you type in your destination, and as long as you allow the program to detect your current location (through the GPS in your cell phone, don’t worry, the FBI doesn’t monitor Google Maps as much as your nervous next-door neighbor might say), it will find a few different ways for you to go. The program monitors traffic patterns. It will tell you which of your selected routes is the fastest. You can choose a course that isn’t the fastest—if you like. You can even start driving and change course in the middle a few times and it will adjust to get you to your destination. The reason I suspect Google Maps may be alleviating traffic is because if a large number of people are using it, then they’re being directed to use roads they might not have used. If one person goes one way and another goes another way, then the problem of traffic is solved, even if it’s only solved for those two motorists. They don’t have to contend with each other because they’ve never met.

Amazon’s Kindle has unintentionally created a benefit to the music industry. People get sick of all the problems with reading a book on their Kindle device, so they throw their hands up in defeat and say, “I’d rather listen to _________!” Then the would-be reader fills in the blank with their favorite music. They pick up an iPod or iPhone and start listening. They connect to a bluetooth speaker and blast away the frustration. Or so I’ve heard.

Did you know there are electric toothbrushes set to two minute run-times? Yep. Certain kinds of electric toothbrushes will actually indicate when you should be done brushing. Two minutes is supposed to be an ideal amount of time for cleaning teeth, so the electric toothbrush will slow down or make a noise to tell you when you’re done. Some people have outsmarted the system and found a two minute song they like, then they brush their teeth to music. When the music’s over, they quit brushing, turn out the light, and go to bed without reading a single digital book.

In a similar way to the Kindle’s hidden benefit, the giant tablets McDonald’s introduced in their lobbies for ordering have convinced fast-food customers to branch out and find a place less fad-oriented. Instead of McD’s, they find a great restaurant such as Taco Time. It only takes seconds for the fast-food customer to realize there really is life beyond the burger. There is also quality of life outside the burger joint. Tasty Veggie Burritos are far more friendly to an artery than a beef sandwich.

And don’t forget the invention of the Modobag. The hidden benefit to this odd motorized suitcase contraption is that people who sit on a plane for eight hours can continue sitting as they make their way through the airport. Everyone in the world needs more time for sitting.