Death and Dying

Today marks the beginning of my self-development project.

6:30 (approximated): I woke from a dream at some point before my alarm went off, but with enough time to fall back asleep again, so I estimate my natural wake time at 6:30 for having gone to bed around 23:00 last night. This is appropriate; humans need between 6-7.5 hours of sleep each night.

I only remember a few disturbing bits of my dream, but I’ll share them here now. I was in San Diego (though, of course, no landmarks or buildings suggested this, I only knew it to be San Diego as one knows things in dreams) and Alice was accosting me for deserting her. She was accosting me from Níke’s bedroom, but not the bedroom Níke and I shared, it was the bedroom Níke lived in before she and I started dating, before we moved in together. Alice was accosting me using Charlie’s Objection, which I would love to treat with greater detail later. For now, just understand that Charlie objects to living with someone before marriage because it takes modern human couples between two and three years to move past the initial stage of sexual attraction in the development of their relationship. (The why and the how are immaterial for this discussion.) He says that a lengthy engagement allows two individuals to become firm friends long before they marry and share a bed, so they have a strong foundation on which to stand after the sandcastle of sexual attraction melts away. Since Alice and I hardly knew each other before we started dating, and we dated for about two and a half years before breaking up, the argument was raised that we were simply at the end of that first cycle and needed to stay more committed to each other in order to weather the storm and become even deeper involved with each other.

While I agree with the appraisal of relationships in general, I’ve learned enough about myself to know that this is not the case. First of all, I know that my sexual attraction cycle is much shorter than the average person’s, so I require much more to keep me involved in a relationship starting at around the year mark. Since Alice and I were past two years when we decided to break up, I can safely assert that I spent a year and a half being persistently devoted to that woman and our relationship must have suffered for reasons other than biology. Secondly, Alice and I had lengthy conversations about why we needed to break up, and it was mutually determined that there were too many fundamental differences between us to sustain a lifelong commitment to each other. This does support Charlie’s Objection in part: a lengthy engagement before getting involved with sex and living together would have afforded us the opportunity to realize this incompatibility much earlier on, and we might have avoided a lot of unpleasantries. However, not knowing Charlie’s Objection at the time, there was no way to plan for that in advance.

Anyway, Alice in my dream was accosting me with Charlie’s Objection, and I replied with the above rebuttals. Then dream-Alice did something that real-Alice would never have done (in case she or someone who knows her reads this, I don’t want there to be any confusion about the kindheartedness of this girl). Dream-Alice accused the woman I was seeing now of having no future.

Dreams are strange. My father tells me to interpret dreams as if I am every person in them, so what happens next makes an eerie kind of sense. The argument I was having in my dream shifted upon those words to an argument between me and my girlfriend, and it was I who accused her of having no future. In the dream, she merely stormed off, but I leapt to her defense even as I was waking up. Leaving aside the self-reflective questions about why I would say or think such a thing, I immediately launched into my refutation.

It is categorically untrue that any rational being is incapable of improvement. Leaving questions of mortality aside, I assume the nature of a rational being to be that of always being in a position to better itself in one way or another, and thus it is utter metaphysical blasphemy to accuse one of having no future. It is against everything philosophy and metaphysical morality have taught me. It is an awful thing to say.

Second, this woman lives in a perpetual state of improvement. Never satisfied with herself or her state, she constantly pushes herself beyond her bounds and beyond her means to build a better world for herself and her daughter, and to build a better spirit within. To say she has no future is to discount her tireless toil every single day to rise above herself the day before, and she does work hard.

Third, she has my interest and commitment. I’m not trying to suggest that I’m some kind of superhero or messiah, but I will humbly assert that my outlook and ideals are a positive influence on the people who are receptive to them. She trusts me enough to learn from what little wisdom I have garnered over my tenure in life, and she takes to heart many of the things I know to be true. Those of you who know me know my commitment to people, so she can never be in too much trouble as long as she has me to ask when she needs help.

It was a very low, very base, and very baseless accusation.

6:45 (First Alarm): I woke up the second time to my first alarm. I’ve always been in the habit of setting multiple alarms, never wanting to leave it to chance that I oversleep just one of them and miss my shift at work. Oftentimes, I take this multiple-alarm system for granted and lie in bed long enough to be woken up by my second and third alarms, only finally getting up when the last alarm rings. (“Rings” is the wrong word; I use my iPhone for my multiple alarms, and they’re all either Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ratatat or Andrew Bird songs, depending on the severity of the time.)

Today I determined to sit up in bed immediately and move to a standing position as soon as I could afterward. This is similar to the “psychological space” I was discussing yesterday; if you remain lying down in the dark, your mind (which associates that position with sleeping) will encourage you to sleep. As soon as I stood up, I felt much less foggy than I usually do in the mornings and had no morning headache.

6:55 (First Meditation): Trev DeTal taught me my sitting meditation practice, although I’ve omitted his chanting and incense-burning. I dust off my zafu and place it on the floor in the center of my living room. I bow and assume the half-lotus position. I set a meditation timer using an app on my iPhone, and it sounds a bell for me to begin my practice. Trev taught me that those just starting out in meditation should focus on their breathing and posture first and foremost. You should sit, right foot on left knee, with your back erect such that your ears are above your shoulders and your shoulders are above your hips. This position should be held high, as if a string were pulling upwards through your spine from your pelvis to the top of your head. Hands are cradled in your lap, right holding left, with your thumbs a paper’s width apart, forming an oval. Eyes relaxed but open face forward, and are slightly parted. It’s recommended to breathe through your nose, but I had to breathe through my mouth due to some early morning congestion.

Then breathe.

Trev says that, during meditation, you will most likely attempt to empty your mind of all thoughts and be persistently frustrated by your inability to do so. Thinking about not thinking is still thinking. So he advised this instead: inhale slowly and when you have a full breath, exhale while counting “one” in your mind. That “one” should be your only thought, and with its strength and the strength of your breath, you should push outward all other distractions and fleeting ideas. Your whole being has become a count, and you should exhale until your lungs are empty and you hang on the precipice of non-existence. Then inhale slowly again and count “two.” 

The first time I attempted this, I never made it to ten. My thoughts, the noisy little buggers, would always overpower the count in my mind, and Trev advised me to start over if I lost count. Today, however, I realized upon reaching ten that I was still holding on to a thought and needed to continue without counting. 

7:00 (Second Alarm): My meditation was disturbed by my second alarm going off, “Measuring Cups” by Andrew Bird. While meditating, it’s important to let your mind be a swinging door that allows ideas to come and go freely. It takes years of practice to enjoy a truly empty mind, but the best we can hope for is to have a mind that is not so attached to new ideas that it tries to keep them, and a mind that is not so closed as to refuse other ideas entry. So when my alarm went off, I let it run for several minutes while I tried to continue with my practice. It was just another thought, and should not have concerned me.

I let it disturb me too much, unfortunately, and I started to worry that it would be a nuisance to my neighbors upstairs. I bowed to the universe and everything that was in it and reached down to silence the alarm.

The rest of my meditation was uneventful.

7:20 (First Run): After my meditation, I took the opportunity to stretch, dust off my zafu, and put it back in its place. I rely on the Nike+ sensor and app on my iPod Nano to keep track of my progress as I run and set the timer to 20 minutes. I put on the Album Leaf’s record “In a Safe Place” and took off. When I run, I try to engage in the same practice as when I meditate, namely I try to maintain good posture and focus on my breathing. The music in my ears and the things around me are a little too distracting for me to hope to empty my mind, so I instead try to meditate on my other thoughts of the morning. I spent a lot of time dissecting the dream I outlined above, but also had this very novel idea based on a garden box I saw on someone’s lawn:

The above diagram was a quick sketch I drew on my iPad.

As you can see, I have designed a sort of yard stake that has two slots at ninety-degree angles from each other. The idea is that you can take four planks of wood, whatever size you have lying around, and fashion a temporary box quickly and easily by driving these stakes into the ground at the corners. If you were to lay a tarp down across the middle, you could hold mulch, gravel, dirt, sand or even water as needed until you were finished with the gardening project that called for them. After you’re finished, you could just pull up the stakes and stack the planks. The modular design would allow the box to be whatever dimensions you needed, limited only by the wood on hand and the grade of the ground where you wanted to install it. You could even make a more permanent flower-box that would be resizable as needed. Not the most universally-useful idea in the world, but a nice one nonetheless.

7:45 (Return and Breakfast): At this point, only an hour has passed, and I’ve already brushed my teeth, meditated, and returned from my morning run. I made a cup of coffee to cool while I took my shower, made breakfast and washed the dishes. I sat down for a cup of coffee and a smoke (with my Blu, no carcinogens) at my computer to write my reflections on the morning.

I realize now that I have waxed most verbose and philosophical, and maybe have spoken too personally at times, but I believe my greatest contribution to the world will be my thoughts, and it’d be a waste to keep them to myself. I still have ample time to get ready for work and a whole workday ahead of me before I begin my studies tonight.

Remember: everything is totally manageable.