Old Friends, Gardening and Hypnosis

An old friend dropped by today, and we discussed how, in getting older, the nature of the challenge shifts ---more towards an ability to experience the events to come with equanimity. Serenity. To gain control of the negativity of the mind in the face of adverse circumstance, which becomes more important than worldly gain, status or security. Obviously this challenge may start earlier for some, and I'm grateful we're just now getting there, and even that we have made it to the point where it becomes a consideration.

We riffed on a favorite quote by Nietzsche: "Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him." The gardener controls what seeds are planted, and weeds out those that yield no produce, or strangle the resources of the good seeds around them.

We talked about thoughts which held value, and how they differ from the thoughts of day to day concerns. He was interested in exploring the sowing of seeds with hypnosis to help counter what he was finding difficult or impossible to do with conscious intent and will. The mind is a resistant mule: prone to habit, and laziness of thought which it scores as an efficiency. I think hypnosis will work for him, for some things. I am glad to see people searching for what is truly of value, beyond our immediate survival, which is guaranteed to end. On this plane anyway.

I know religions have pat answers for this, for what is of value, so it requires no thought or meditation. But thought and meditation can complement these beliefs, and even inform them, by taking a more critical assessment of what's important in our lives. Moment to moment. Day to day. Year to year. And to realize that we are infinitely distracted from, and infinitely forgetful of, that which is more important to us than just passing priorities at any given time. It was a good talk, with much to ponder going forward.

 It did re-spark an off and on passion I've had with hypnosis since childhood. And I've been using this download to good effect recently.

Be More Centered. From Hypnosis Downloads. It's been subtly beneficial in some nonspecific ways these last couple of days.

Assisted Living - Delegating the Small Stuff

The complexity of modern living can be smothering. Sometimes it feels like we spend all of our time just staying afloat ---to paddle forward requires twice the effort. Days, weeks and months go by, our dreams are clogged with laundry, dishes, meals, shopping, appointments, bills, cleaning, maintenance. It's easy to slip into reaction mode and just squeeze out little pieces of open sky from the onslaught of mundane responsibilities.  But then we put things off, things slip, and our daily duties start piling up like Magoo's closet. Our mind is constantly hyper, worrying about balls that we've dropped or things we've forgotten that might blindside us.

If only we had servants and staff to handle all this trivia so we can free our minds to contemplate the important stuff, the fun stuff, instead of this urgent stuff.

Well, modern times also bring unique opportunities for freeing ourselves if we use it strategically (or burying ourselves deeper in distractions if we don't.) I've been pretty successful with the former, and here's the approach I've used for several years to keep my head as empty as possible. Instead of servants, I have something better... agents.

1. Google Calendar. Anything that has to happen a certain date, I put on the calendar and forget about it. It's synced with my email client (Thunderbird) using Lightening (a calendar add-on.) When I check my mail in the morning I can see the whole week or month of places I have to be at a certain time and date. I share it with my mate, since we only have one car, we can both make entries and know whether we'll have transportation or whether we'll need to bike, bus or walk. It's synced with my phone and if I'm particularly paranoid about missing an important engagement, I can setup alerts or sms notifications. Very low maintenance, a few seconds to enter something, a few seconds in the morning to get a snapshot.

2. Journal. Here's where I put all the stuff that needs done but doesn't involve a specific date. I have a section for projects, active and queued to capture notes, a section for 'this week' and one for 'today.' After reading the mail and checking the calendar, I start with a blank slate for the day, I check the day before, to see if I want to carry anything forward, or refile it in projects and just write the stuff I actually plan to accomplish today. At the end of the week I review my active projects and any backlog and plan for the week to come. The Journal makes sure that, even if I don't do much any given day, I haven't lost sight of anything important. It's also a place I post to myself about whatever I'm thinking, much more productive than doing the same on social media or blogs.

3. Mind map. I do this once a quarter, it's basically a big map of what I want to do, explore, accomplish from a big picture perspective. It may tag projects from my journal but it's a holistic, 10000 foot view of all areas of my life, from fitness, to learning, enrichment, etc. Whenever I want to get my bearings, I look at the map.

4. Anki. I learn a lot of stuff everyday. Most of it I forget. The stuff I actually want to remember I just slap into Anki as an index card. Anki optimizes the review of information, with the minimum fuss possible, to retain a memory. It's designed so I spend the least amount of time reviewing in order to ensure I remember what I want. Anki takes only a few minutes a day and only reviews the stuff it knows you are about to forget.

5. Whiteboard for shopping. As I run out of stuff or think of things I'd like to eat, or stuff I have to pickup, I jot it down on a whiteboard with headings for places like Costco, Target, Supermarket, etc. When I'm ready to make a shopping run, I take a snapshot of the board with my phone and I've got my shopping list.

These 5 little assistants require very little ongoing maintenance, they are all basically just a place I can put something once, get it out of my head, and then go about my day with the assurance that nothing is going to fall through the cracks. I don't need to be reviewing stuff with wasted brain cycles all the time worried that I'm not keeping pace with the demands of living in a complex world.
  

Time and Energy

For too many years I got this equation wrong. I thought it was about time...budgeting, prioritizing, structuring. I was a GTD junky (Getting Things Done.) I went through most of the systems out there. None of them worked for long. What was missing was, like most people I know, I had flipped the equation on its head.

It's easy, when we're working, to think our time is the critical factor. But let's explore what happens when we make energy the focus instead.

Every day we wake up with a certain amount of energy. Depending on how well we slept, what we did the night before and the size of our battery. We get additional reserves and capacity from exercise and what we eat.

The same 3 hour period at work may consume 30% of this, or it may consume 60%, depending on the nature of the task and the way we manage our energy. On days where we blow our energy early, we don't have much left over for things like family, taking care of ourselves and activities that enrich us.

Once we start observing how we are spending energy, rather than time, we may learn some interesting things. Some of them are counter-intuitive.

For example, it's seldom work or chores that actually sap energy, instead it's often 'leaks.'

We may not notice those donuts or quick bite we snatched at a drive-thru to save time actually incurred a major withdrawal from our energy account the rest of the day. The time we bought sleeping in instead of working out, actually reduced the reserves for the next several days. Even the type of thoughts we choose to entertain may leave us with little energy after we get home to do anything other than 'veg' out in front of the t.v. and netflix in an attempt to escape the demands for cleaning the house, doing the laundry and taking care of logistics. Then the tasks loom even larger, suck even more energy, as things pile up. We fight like heck to "protect" our time from these pesky chores while punching holes in our energy tanks.

When we start becoming energy conscious, we may begin noticing that something innocuous like hangin out on facebook or surfing the internet, mysteriously saps the energy left over for projects we're exciting about or directions we would passionately like to pursue, if we just had more energy. And oddly, this "down" time of distractions, which seems to require minimal energy, does nothing to replenish us.

As we get older, this habitual way of dealing with time, rather than energy, takes a heavier and heavier toll. We may find ourselves in a depressing cycle, dreaming about a 'tomorrow' where we get everything under control, where the conditions are better, where we take a nice vacation.

But tomorrow is just another miscalculation. Just misplaced attention. When we change our basic orientation, to one of energy suddenly things start becoming clearer. Brighter. We begin rationing energy instead of time and we find it was the tail wagging the dog all along. With an abundance of energy, we find we actually do have the time for all those things we want to accomplish. And not only that, we are far more alive and see more immediate gain than when we were trying to organize our time instead of our energy.