Posts Tagged → mindfulness

They always had chicken tenders and they weren’t great but they were hot and ready when a lot of other things weren’t

When someone you love is slowly dying, one thing no one really tells you about is just how much goddamned sitting around you have to do. Something like 75% of the whole shebang is time spent just sitting in a chair in a little room with the people you care about waiting for something bad to happen.

The other 25% of it is, based on my experience, forgetting to eat and then running down to the hostpital cafeteria before it closes to see if there are any chicken tenders left.

Anywho, there were a bunch of times in that room when I’d look up as if suddenly coming awake and see that, of the six or seven people squeezed in to be at Dad’s bedside, all of us were looking at our phones. Everyone except Dad, of course, who was busy with other matters.

It was surreal and … kind of horrifying. A definite, “My God, what have we become?” sort of moment.

I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or blaming anybody or any of that jazz. It’s just that I’m a teacher and I spend a lot of my day fighting to keep people off their phones so they can get some work done. These days, I have a sort-of conditioned response to seeing a room full of lowered heads and a bunch of tiny, glowing rectangles. I see how f*ing insidious our cellular masters are. I get angry about it.

In that room with Dad, I’d purposefully put my phone away and just sit. Not the whole time, but every now and again, when the urge hit me. It wasn’t meditation, but something akin to it, when I’d pick a sound or something and try to focus on it and just … exist in that room. Sometimes I counted seconds, sometimes I counted breaths, sometimes I counted the number of times the IV Dad was hooked up to made its little pumping noise. (It had to pump 4,000 times to go through one bag of IV fluid.)

Was it worth doing? Trying to “be in the moment” rather than scrolling? F*ck, I don’t know. It was hard not to be nihilistic or fatalistic when Dad was dying right there, to say to myself, “What is the point of anything?” and then mindlessly swipe through TikTok or Reddit. Take comfort where you can find it, right?

There have definitely been times when I’ve thought that the sort of distractions phones can give was a comfort. A blessing, even.

But we all know better.

The thing to remember is that all you can really do is anything at all

I’ve had these moments for the past several days where my body will suddenly stop whatever it’s doing, as if put on pause, and an incredible and inescapable sense of ennui will wash over me like a layer of quick-dry cement. I’ll be just walking down the hallway with a cup of tea on my way to 2nd block when, WHAM, it hits. In this moment of intense hopelessness, my thoughts will turn incredibly dark and I’ll feel this sense of, “What’s the use of any of this? Why am I — why are WE doing any of this nonsense?”

It lasts for a fraction of a second; anybody watching would probably think I’d just had to do a sneaky, stutter-step fart or something, and then I’m back to normal, just walking along like everything is fine.

I don’t know why, but I feel a little guilty about it. Is that dumb? I think it is. It’s a stupid thing to feel guilty about and I’m aware of that, but I imagine what Dad is going through and can’t help but think he’s the one who is in the thick of it. I should focus on how to be helpful rather than dwelling on how bad I feel.

I talked to my brother about it quite a bit yesterday and I said something to the effect of, “I’m really starting to think that the only thing I can do — the only thing any of us can do — is to find happiness in little moments. Stop thinking about the past, stop thinking about the future, take a cue from all of those eastern philosophers and just live in the now.”

Trite? Maybe. Cliche? One-hundred percent. But it’s one way that I’m able to find some sort of comfort. Plus, in a new-agey, hippy sort of way, I really do think that Taoism has the right idea with entering a “flow state.” Spending too much time dwelling on the future is missing the point entirely.

Anywho, I was telling my brother this in the context of sharing this perhaps-too-on-the-nose clip from the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood:

(The part I’m talking about is at the end. “..to die is to be human, and anything human is mentionable. Anything mentionable is manageable. Anything mentionable is manageable.”)

I’ve also (surprise!) been thinking a lot about how uncomfortable most of us feel talking about death. I’ve been able to talk frankly about it with a few people in my life — Sarah, my brothers, a few friends — and it really does seem helpful.

Just keep moving, keep busy, keep talking. One foot in front of the other.

A vice so nice I did it twice

Over the last few years, I’ve gone to great lengths to rid myself of vices. I’ve given up smoking, alcohol, soda, and coffee. I’ve started trying to eat healthier, to drink more water, and to exercise more.

If I’m being honest, it’s been horrible. More than horrible. Boring.

When I lived and taught in Korea (between 2008 and 2019), drinking and smoking were practically required. It’s a pretty big cultural difference — I went out with coworkers much more frequently than you do in the U.S. People drank, smoked, and generally had a rip-roaring good time about once a week. It made you feel cool.

(In Korea I’ve been stumbling around drunk at 2 AM on a weeknight with the principal of the elementary school I worked at. There wasn’t anything strange about it. Everyone thought it was normal. Good even. In contrast, at my current school, we go out to dinner or something about once or twice each year.)

I feel decidedly uncool. In fact, I’m as square as a set of dice.

I’m pretty sure what I’m describing is called “growing up,” but it hasn’t been easy.

I’ve been trying to get myself to take pleasure in small things — the little daily rituals you do without thinking about it. Basically, I’ve been trying to think of myself as a character in a Haruki Murakami novel.

In case you’ve never read any of Murakami’s work, there are very frequently characters who embrace simplicity and routine as if it were their entire identity.

Tengo washed the rice, put it in the cooker, and turned on the switch. He used the time until the rice was ready to make miso soup with wakame seaweed and green onions, grill a sun-dried mackerel, take some tofu out of the refrigerator and flavor it with ginger, grate a chunk of daikon radish, and reheat some leftover boiled vegetables. To go with the rice, he set out some pickled turnip slices and a few pickled plums.

Besides being fantastic about food writing, you can see in this excerpt from 1Q84 that Murakami’s characters have a certain kind of presence (as in present in the moment) that I wish wish wish I possessed. I want to be the sort of person who can not only put together a healthy meal, but also enjoy the process.

I’m not there yet, but I’ve been trying for so long that I’ve started to wonder if it’s even possible.

Ultimately nothing did happen

This blog wasn’t exactly a new year’s resolution; it just so happened that I started blogging again at the beginning of a new year and was somewhat resolved to blog every day. Like any pedestrian chump, though, I fell off after about a month.

Sad!

The trick is, I’ve learned, not to beat yourself up over resolutions that you make. Buddhists always say “Everyone suffers,” but if I could add a western spin to that idea, I’d say, “Everyone fails.”

It’s just true. No matter what you do, how often you do it, how good you are at it, or whether or not that thing is your passion, you will have setbacks and you will eventually face failure.

Imagine two people who make a resolution to go jogging every morning. Both people, being regular people, will eventually fail at this resolution in some wayshaperform. It just happens — they have a sick day or they forget to set an alarm or the ground is covered in ice — the world conspires against them and they can’t jog.

Womp womp! But how do they react to this failure; that’s the question.

Person A says to themselves, “My perfect record is tainted! I’d planned to run every day, but now that I’ve failed, what’s the use? Everything is horrible and life is a crap chute!” So they stay home and feel bad about their failure because it wasn’t perfect.

Person B says, “Oh, I couldn’t jog yesterday. Whoops!” and then goes jogging anyway.

I have, unfortunately, always put myself in the former category. I wish I wasn’t there, but here we are. I beat myself up for failing at goals that I have set for myself and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Other than to keep plugging away at this blog as if nothing happened. Because, ultimately, nothing did happen.