2018.04.14 - Day 31

One almond. The tree is in here. Does it really use a lot of water? Possibly. Not all the costs of our food are easily visible, but they are always there. All the more reason to be grateful the food is there.

So nice that so many old friends attended today's festivities along with all the new friends. Thanks to all the people who prepared for the day.

new intention: same as last 30. Wonder. Two ways.

Savoring.

My son once described his friend as "an easy laugher", and I thought, what a great quality! And a great quality too, that he (my son) noticed. It felt like that today. A lot of talent on display, and a lot of appreciators, reflecting back. edited 23:12, 14 Apr 2018

Thank you Eliza for extending this project and inviting people to join anew on Day 31! :))

My theme will be a particular take on Imagined Future Self, in keeping with and inspired by one of the themes of our tenth year celebrations. And it seems appropriate that Day 1 for me (Day 31 for most others) coincides with the poetry recital, in which I was fortunate and grateful to have been invited to take part.

I have often said that, at least for me, I feel no barrier between my first life and my second life. (I think it even says as much on one of my SL profile tabs.) Possibly as a result, I more or less eschewed role-play for most of my time in Second Life, and it was only a couple of years ago, 10 years after first entering Second Life, that I finally understood the value of role-play (or one value of many). I was reading "The Path" by Professor Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh (highly recommended) and they were talking about Confucius's "Analects" in which he describes the As-If world and As-If rituals, and how what matters is the benefits that flow from being fully present in those rituals, whether or not you believe they are doing what they pretend to do. When I read that, suddenly so much of Second Life made sense.

What I want to address in the three weeks or so of this project is this. I want to identify what feels like me now, and what is a baseline for going forward. This will probably mean sweeping away a lot of assumptions and old habits! I want to decide what I want to develop. (I'm 65 and time is not an infinitely available resource.) I want to expose whether an Imagined Future Self is really important for me - or not - or whether it's more random or trivial.

However, I'm not going to create or role-play this as an Imagined Future Self in Second Life, at least not at first. Instead I'm going to use the Diaspora* social network.The reason for this is partly Diaspora's use of hashtags to create personal identities, making them searchable and potentially making me personally more vulnerable. I will really have to think through each facet of me that I decide to expose in this new identity, and that may take quite some time. (I may not get it right first time.) Additionally this means it's far more "portable" than Second Life as, like other social media, I can access it from any device without trying to navigate a Second Life presence. I chose Diaspora* because it's a decentralized social network (I could even start my own server or "pod") with a big focus on freedom, privacy and open source development. (A lot of recent Facebook refugees are currently trying it!)

How will I assess "progress"? I don't know yet. I don't yet know "what success looks like". I don't know what the endpoint will be in 21 days or so, if there even is one. I do feel it's important to try and that the journey will be beneficial. In a way, this is another example of AsIfism. In any case, I'll record my progress here.

I promise that subsequent posts will be much briefer! :)

I may not be consistent in my day's contribution but better to be inconsistent than not participate. My theme... a drawing a day.... I have a lovely notebook that I purchased a while ago that has very few sketches in it, my attempt is to draw what I see when I draw, preferably every day.... hehe. I will attempt to be somewhere different each day. I will try it include a picture of the RL part of my sketch. No judgments (on my part) just whatever come of this. Cheers (and yes, I'm watching Star Trek on the tele)

Day 1 of exploring "how to not do 50 things at once":

My habit in the morning is to sit and read the news on my smart phone while at the same time drinking my tea. I decide to set my tea mug aside and give my full attention to the reading. After a minute, I find I am becoming anxious because I fear my tea will be cold by the time I get back to it. So I set down the smart phone and now give my full attention to drinking the tea. After a minute or so I set down the tea and go back to reading the news. Alternating back and forth between just drinking tea and just reading the news (instead of doing both at once), I notice how different the two behaviors feel. When reading on my phone, my eyes and muscles are tense, as I hunch forward and focus narrowly on the text. My thinking mind is totally engaged with the information I am reading and with my reactions to it. When I switch to drinking the tea, my focus softens and widens. I become more aware of the surrounding room and the sensations of the warm cup in my hands, the tea on my tongue. But there is nothing to engage my thinking mind in the drinking of the tea, and so my mind keeps wandering off into various lines of thought, making it hard to keep my attention on the tea. Interesting, that it seems easier to "just read the news" than to "just drink tea."

Well, I suppose that was a first step. I really don't have a clear notion of how to proceed with this on following days. I will be making it up as I go along.

It was a good night of sleep. It has taken me a week and a half to not wake up in the middle of the night and then lie there thinking too much. I was on a whirlwind trip for 6 days at the end of march in which I arrived in Asheville NC to help my son and his family drive to their new home in Maine. I see with the stress of driving unfamiliar roads, taking care of the family, and having jet lag I was very wound up.It was the adrenaline that kicked in I guess. Since I came home I participated in an auction for my choir and started getting a rental house ready to put on the market. If I feel pulled in several directions at one time there is good reason. I have listened for a dream but not heard it today:) Mostly just the sound of rain on the roof. Unfortunately my meeting today made it impossible to attend the festivities.I thought that on the days I have no dream I might share just something I noticed or heard as if in a dream while awake.It requires my slowing down to listen and look and be in the present moment.

Great to have this platform for musings - long time since I used it - but can I keep it up? So many activities to bite up time.I just finished a 'Maintaining Mindfulness' course. Very worthwhile for reducing stress and keeping focus in such a distracting world, but starting to see limitations of mindfulness.

so interesting your project Storm ... I read Puett's book last year and recommended it to our PaB book club ... and I too recommend it again here:

[2017/10/05 13:21] Bleu (bleu.oleander): "the Path" by Michael Puett
[2017/10/05 13:21] Bleu (bleu.oleander): https://www.amazon.com/Path-Chinese-Philosophers-Teach-About/dp/1476777845/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507234685&sr=8-1&keywords=path
[2017/10/05 13:21] Bleu (bleu.oleander): excellent !!!

I will enjoy following along ...

an excellent talk/summary of the book is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfnSTr6-1g4 edited 13:19, 15 Apr 2018