http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kica8hmSdAM

Some weeks later, I'm browsing YouTube, and I find Derrick's made a follow-up video, after recieving SO MUCH response (the video got Dugg a ba-jillion times on Digg.com). He entitled the video "Why I Support Obama - The Emotional Response". As much as I always keep my cynicism at close range, by the end of this video, I found myself a little choked up. He managed to put into words my own feelings about what I want most for America. Go Derrick. Good on ya.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2zO5d-XZWA

Anyway. Felt compelled to post some thoughts. I've been a little quite on Xanga since all my comments were deleted and Xanga stopped talking to me about it. I haven't moved on yet... not fully, so... there you go.

• The Assault on Reason - Al Gore
• The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
• The Measure of a Man - Sidney Poitier
• Buddha's Teachings - Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai
  

SIMPLICITY
THE FATHER OF INTENTION

"Tis a gift to be simple, tis' a gift to be free,
Tis a gift to come 'round where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
t'will be in the valley of love and delight."
~ Shaker's Hymn

"What would happen," you began asking me... "if someone had transplanted your mind into the body of a hummingbird?"

"Aside from being a very messy and overall unsatisfying ordeal?" I asked.

"Come on. You're not playing the game right," you quipped back. In those last two days, you'd detailed to me a world that had dissolved into a series of metaphors. You were describing a series of days you'd experienced sometime in the past, that had been dominated inexplicably by a series of raw, undiluted possibilities the nature of which you couldn't fathom. As each new day had struck, you were faced with a brand new emanation, and invariably... so far at least... felt your life profoundly impacted by that unflinching, unshakeably idealistic intention. You'd caught me reflecting on what you'd said up until now, and tapped your glass sharply with your spoon.

"Mind... hummingbird... Seriously."

"Right, right." I said. "I take it, you mean... because a hummingbird has the fastest metabolism of any animal on the planet." I remembered reading that a hummingbird could flap its wings 80 times a second, and that... in contrast to the average human heartrate of 60 to maybe 100 beats per minute... a hummingbird's heart might beat as high as 1,260 times in that same minute... almost 16 times as fast. You knew my preoccupation with useless trivia like this, so I tried not to take the bait too quickly, geeking out to your suggestions of mad science. In spite of that resistance however, I found my curiosity piqued.

"If such a thing were possible," you said... "--imagine how the world might seem to you."

"You mean, everything would seem fast?" I asked, finally giving in. "No. Exactly the opposite. From your perspective... everything would move incredibly slowly." You went on to explain that this was exactly what you awoke to that next day. It wasn't really like you'd gained superpowers or anything, but you described a world in which time didn't seem as persistant a hound, nipping at your heels. You spent the first part of that morning trying desperately to figure out which possibility might have this effect in your life, making things seem so surreal.

When your eyes first opened, it wasn't really a sound so much as music was the closest thing you could relate to the feeling of connection. You exercised and there was a concerto, your body being the solo instrument against an orchestra of adrenalyn. The experience seemed to focus your attention on any task at hand, making the mundane into a masterpiece. As you walked from your bedroom, an adagio played and your thoughts collected with each footstep. Somewhere, your mind wanted to race through the millions of stray thoughts available, but the various melodies kept things effortlessly in tempo, your preparations for breakfast segueing into your mornings' ablutions. With every change of venue accompanied by its own leitmotiv, it was almost as if this day had become some internal rendition of Peter and the Wolf.

"Reminds me of that Disney film with all the music..." I said, smiling across the table.

"What, Fantasia? Trust me, if hallucinations of dancing brooms and prancing centaurs had accompanied all of this, I'd have immediately checked into the emergency room."

"Had you figured out the possibility?"

"Simplicity" you said looking up from your coffee which, from your sour expression, had gone a bit cold. This day, you had been experiencing the possibility of simplicity. It had taken some time before you recognized it. In the presence of simplicity fast became slow and chaos became consequence. You found yourself doing a series of broad strokes in the short time before you left for work. Even while you made mental notes to sort through them later, your hands emptied the various counters and shelves of your apartment of their various occupants. Where relocation wasn't practical, these items piled into a series of plastic bags you then consigned to your basement.

You moved from room to room, assessing and operating with the intentionality of a conductor, orchestrating a symphony of serenity by reducing your environment to its most basic nature. By the end of your rounds, you'd packed nearly 10 bags, pausing only slightly to separate clothes from paperwork, and the vitally important from those items you knew weren't immediately necessary to find. You felt your own curiosity ignored, as if your body were sorting through someone else's things, pausing only long enough to rifle through your memory for the most rudimentary identification. When it was all complete, you stood, looking around at a process that while taking only 45 minutes... had transformed your living space into an impossibly basic collection of furniture, bare necessities and empty surfaces. When you realize you weren't breathing, you took a sharp inhale of air, only to notice that halted quality to it that usually signally some deeply emotional episode. Across the expanse of empty space, echoing through the void was something like a soft ritornello , that recurring passage of music that gave this whole crazy experience unity and form. Before you drove off to work, the contents of your car found themselves caught in a tornado, its tail depositing the many contents into another labeled bag. While you knew it was still simplicity, the rampant emptiness that was flooding into your life brought on recurring thoughts of opportunity... as if everything around you began to call out with unrealised potential. Like riding the crest of a wave however, there was irony in that holding that open, unadorned space, was far more powerful and invigorating that giving into it.

Throughout your day, the beat went on. Your world had been imprinted with a rhythm you'd never before been able to notice. Even in the midst of conversations, you found yourself listening far more than talking, simply to enjoy the unknowing performance of each speaker. As if participants in your own private recital, you listened to each of them with an intensity that even they seemed to feel. When the speaker was focused and clear, regardless of the message (the woman from accounting explaining why she needed to borrow your stapler for the next 2 days was almost poetic), you felt that swell of triumph as the soloist departed the stage. You also felt a deep empathy for those that struggled to play, from bad notes, to passages that degraded into the equivalent of mashed keys. That empathy often prompted you to say a few words of encouragement, based on those struggling notes you could tell they yearned to play. The recovery was often tentative and muted, but on occasion the performance returned to an amazingly strong finish that regardless of the actual message, almost forced you to your feet with applause.

"Which... of course would have been awkward," you laughed. Not just once, did someone comment on the warmth and attention you showed to them, even when you were forced to wrap the conversation and return to your other responsibilities. Amazingly, even your more malevolent visitors were met by a strange indifference. "Did they succeed in intimidating me today?" you thought wrly from beyond the veil. Like playing a role, you heard yourself chiming in to help their agenda along. "Sorry, I didn't realize that was such a problem. I'll do better next time, okay?" It didn't matter that the gripe was nonsense, and that your tone of contrition seemed an injustice, you let the movement follow-through, and through it seemed to markedly change the quality of the day by its pragmatism and economy of words.

In this way, you thought, it didn't seem like the usual assault of daily invaders, hellbent on making your day more complicated. Instead, they were all gifts, and getting away wasn't a reward, but a movement from one enjoyment to another with the only real structure being to fulfill the promises and agreements you'd made to supervisors and company clients. Incomplete tasks, you felt, were interrupted renditions for which you desperately wanted to hear the ending. "Ode to joy" stopped during its tender opening or "Beethoven's Fifth" cut off at the knees, while approaching into its magnificent conclusion.

Driving home, you "listened" for those items still caught on their last note, and those still waiting to begin. Your thought were not churning over the details as they usually did, but simply making short observations about the unattended thoughts that hung in wait. During your evening run, your mind remained present to the world around you. Every tree you passed, the smell of the heavy wooden bridge damp with an earlier shower during the day, the sound of cars driving by, and birds talking to one another. Everything today seemed to be an excitement of being in the moment, and appreciating it for what it was. Time moved slower, you realized, because it wasn't compressed with its usual battery of thoughts, vying for attention during every moment. When you gave something your attention, it was nearly full and undiluted... the real you, and always present, always listening self that you realized was never usually "all there".

You finished your assorted tasks for the day, and felt an emotional pang of expectation hit you as you lay in your bed. You were staring into the darkness above, and thinking about the three possibilities you'd so far encountered. Responsibility, Integrity, and Simplicity. Integrity helped you clean up your past, unlocking the chains you never realized had held you back. Responsibility helped correct your present, respecting those things that exist here and now, everyday... Both insured that your "wheel" was solid, and had the potential to maintain those bursts of energy that added to your life's momentum, now free and unfettered. Now, you thought... you saw simplicity for what it truly was. It guarded your future.

Before you, a series of options came more steadily into focus, unclouded by the normal busyness that had before invaded your peace of mind. True, all of those bags would need to be tended, but you looked forward to getting to them one by one. You'd heard it said that if you go a year without missing an item that has been packed away, you might considering throwing it away sight unseen. So noted.

Had these things now allowed you to master your past, present and future? If so, what could possibly come next? Before your mind became enveloped in a fit of its usual patterns, you suddenly felt the question was unnecessary. Tomorrow would come soon enough.

To Be Continued...

RESPONSIBILITY

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and
the whole world will be clean." - Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

The next morning, your eyes seemed to pop open automatically, staring directly at the clock on your nightstand.  It was 6 am. But, odd thing though...  it wasn't actually "you" that looked out from those aching, drowsey orbs.  Whatever it was, it immediately lifted your hands up to your face, and examined them curiously.  Your body slowly sat up, before turning over on the bed and arching its back like a cat, with your head in a pillow.  Again it turned over and stretched your legs and arms as the sheets tossled about your hands, your body's heat escaping them, inviting a tantalizing return to blissfull slumber. 

That didn't happen, however.  Instead, it returned to a sitting posture, and closed your eyes, folded your legs, and began taking a series of deep breaths.  In... out.  In... out.  Each breath seemed to make you feel more alert by the moment.  Even though you felt that every molecule of you wanted to just return to sawing wood and counting sheep, somewhere now... deep in the core of your being, was a sense of unmistakeable purpose and sublime intention.  You described experiencing something that wasn't quite an out-of-body sensation, but perhaps a distant cousin twice removed. At that moment, you could feel it... this... "possibility" inside of you... staring dispassionately across the landscape of your memories as it meditated, your eyes still closed, and your body continuing its quiet breathing exercise.

What was it looking for?  You recounted to me how memory is a truly strange thing to experience when something other than you is recalling them.  Kind of like the way a feeling might return to you with the arrival of a familiar smell, or your mind's eye, might spy the face of a past friend everytime you listen to a favorite song you both shared.  For the moment however, there were no smells or sounds to queue the rush of images and feelings you'd begun to see. 

You remember the first time you opened your own checking account, how your mother handed you the small booklet saying that this was a record of your very own savings, and how your heart swelled with pride.  A thought flashed in your head, contrasting the negative balance on your current account, and the 2 credit card bills on your bureau. A flicker of a frown registered on your face. 

Next you remember yourself at 10 years old, running along the beach in shorts and a t-shirt.  You had this manic glee on your face that day, and even though you'd been running for 10 minutes, your two best friends couldn't catch you... and it made you feel alive.  This memory was punctuated by visions on your current state of affairs, so many years later.  You can see the empty fast food wrappers on the backseat of your car, and you remember looking over a note from your doctor recommending you change your diet to moderate your already high blood pressure.  With some shame you remember running for the bus, and being out of breath after a dash over no more than a city block. 

The series of memories marched on unflinchingly, long past the time you'd grown numb to the feelings of depression and angst that had been accompanying them.  As you remembered it, the images started to run together and you started recognizing not just the images, but the context of why certain images matched with others.  They'd represented all the negative, paralyzing conclusions you'd come to about everything that hadn't gone the way you'd wanted them to in life and why it all seemed to happen to you no matter how you tried.  Sometimes you'd blame others, but always you had this twisting feeling that it was all secretly your own fault. No matter what it was, the only common element was that you were there.  Being hit with all of these things at once, somehow, the context changed. It reminded you of an old joke.  It went something like this:

The woman's husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, yet she had stayed by his bedside every single day. One day, when he came to, he motioned for her to come nearer.

As she sat by him, he whispered, eyes full of tears, "You know what? You have been with me all through the bad times. When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I got shot, you were by my side. When we lost the house, you stayed right here. When my health started failing, you were still by my side. You know what?"

"What dear?" She gently asked, smiling as her heart began to fill with warmth.

"I think you're bad luck."

The story made you laugh inside somewhere, and it didn't seem anywhere near as bad anymore.  It was like a cosmic joke, where you couldn't see your best potential cheerleader as anything more than a liability.  When your eyes finally opened, you saw that it was only 6:15 am. Suddenly you could feel your feet touching the cool carpeting of the bedroom.  In moments your hands were too.  You remarked how silly you felt that you didn't immediately realize that your body had begun exercising.  The last time you'd exercised had to be about 4 months prior, before you'd gotten so busy at work, and your morning routine so rushed and manic that you began skipping things.  Here again was the same morning as any other before it, but that sumblime intention just sat there in your spirit, like some spectre of fate saying, "this is what I need to do".  That same feeling carried through as your body ironed your clothes, cooked your breakfast, and prepared your lunch for the day.  You didn't feel a sense of rushing, or panic as your finished each task, but one of clarity and purpose. 

You couldn't help feeling bored and distracted through all of this however, but your body moved on in spite of your aimless thoughts, until you found yourself sitting down with a small notepad in front of you.  Carefully... meticulously, you saw your hand record every important worry and concern that had been bothering you all morning.  With each stroke of the pen, every late promise and outstanding issue was jotted down, and resting the pencil over the list, you took a deep breath, rose to your feet, and walked away.

AT WORK

At work, you arrived 15 minutes before you were supposed to be there.  With the extra time, your hands worked quickly, cleaning much of the junk out of your car, and tossing it into the garbage receptacle outside the building. You found yourself arriving at your desk five minutes early.  Part of you felt a strange confusion that you could somehow make use of that time somewhere else, but on sitting down, you realized that nothing else really needed your attention more than this... not that you had any choice about it.  That day, you felt tickled with how productive you were.  Not only did your body feel well rested, despite not having had much sleep of late, but that list you'd written.... waiting for you on your clean kitchen table at home, almost felt like an extracted poison that usually sat in you all day long putting a shadow over everything you did.  The whole time at work however, that... possibility... was watching, remembering, and from time to time, wrote more things down on a scrap of paper you'd torn from the original list.

There were a few times where you got more than a bit nervous.  There was that new executive that got on your nerves so much.  He'd strolled by your office, coffee cup in hand, and began chatting it up, while your hands typed away, trying to complete a task your mind seemed to want completed by noon.  Usually, you felt you had two options: a.) to give him your undivided attention, or b.) ignore him, pretending to listen, while you continued working.  This time however, within 30 seconds of him beginning to talk about his new backyard pool, you heard your voice saying, "Ed, I'm sorry, I need to get this report out by noon.  If you like we can catch up over lunch?"  Your face tossed him an easy smile, while Ed shot back, "Hey, sure thing, tiger."  Later, at lunch, Ed arrived late, so your ears only listened to part of his story, before politely, you heard your voice signal your exit.  You admitted to me that, even though you had the lowest opinion of the man... that on this particular day... for some reason, everything that usually irritated you to no end, just rolled off like beading water.  It was like you'd found your internal pressure valve and knew how to use it very well.

BEDTIME

On arriving home, the small list created during the day was joined with the list on your kitchen table.  Even though you'd just gotten home, your hands grabbed your coat again, and you found yourself walking down the street, and around the block.  Your legs walked for about 30 minutes before returning home so that your hands could prepare a warm dinner after your round of light cardio.  After dinner, your hands pulled the list close to you, and checking off a couple of items, you found yourself handling them as best you could so that they were no longer on the list.  Using a magnet, your hands fastened the list to the refrigerator. 

Your body was back, resting in your bed long before usual that night.  Your lips sipped hot chai tea you'd picked up from the store on your way home, and your eyes read a book from your library of many, many unread books. 

Somewhere along the line, you began getting sleepy.  Your body forced itself back to the kitchen sink, where your hands washed the cup, before returning your legs to the warmth of the comforter on the bed.  Your head nuzzled the pillow, as the lights were turned out by your outstretched hand.

"This was a good day," you thought into the darkness... "thank you."  Ordinarily, you admitted to me, such an approach to your day seemed like it would be boring, or annoying, but simply "riding along" with how this unfolded, you felt much more complete.  Like you were the master of your own fate, and that no one else could tell you otherwise.  Your mind wasn't filled with anxiety that night, and even though your thoughts of what tomorrow might bring were the source of much bustle inside of your brain, it wasn't really a "worry"...

Given the satisfaction you felt from today, tomorrow was something you were very much looking forward to.

To Be Continued...
Originally posted: January 10th, 2007

"You must take personal responsibility. You cannot
change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind,
but you can change yourself. That is something you
have charge of." - Jim Rohn