Complaining, cont'd

“Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself.”  A week ago, I posted this quotation from Eckhart Tolle.  This idea has been on my mind for a few weeks now, and I’ve been noticing my little complaints, noticing how they cut me off from others, even if only a little bit.  Paying attention to the mind is interesting.  So often, these complaints come to me unbidden, and often, they produce a certain kind of self-righteous enjoyment.

Tolle distinguishes between complaining and informing someone of a mistake that can be made right.

Tee Shirt Trivia

I heard this interesting fact this morning on Morning Edition:  It takes six miles of yarn (what we call thread) to make a simple tee shirt.  (More here)

Sad Numbers

Here’s a sad statistic from Paul Krugman:

Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade — who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with — have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973. 

Pumpkin Pie

The quotation below is from Ryan O’Hanlon in his article “In Praise of Pumpkin Pie:”

Without pumpkin pie, there would be no reason to continue with this elegiac revisionist-historical sham that is Thanksgiving. Without it, we’re left with bland, unfrozen white meat that always looks better than it tastes, an excuse to not actually bake bread, mashed potatoes (which are actually pretty good, I’ll admit), and continued suppression of what happened to the Native Americans after the first meal was over.

 Yesterday I posted a passage from Eckhart Tolle on the problem with complaining.  And for some reason, I love O’Hanlon’s complaint.  Maybe it’s the humor.

The One Day

This is a nice meditation on gratefulness and appreciating the present moment.

Who me...complain?

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself.

I know I read this line by Eckhart Tolle (in A New Earth) years ago. I read it again a few weeks ago and this time it has been hanging on.  I’ve started noticing my complaints and how, when I pay attention, I can feel the wall they create that separates me from something, often a person who has inspired my complaining.  I am fascinated by the prevalence of complaining and some of the trivial things that inspire it.  This awareness has lessened slightly my complaining mind.  Sometimes I laugh at the things I complain about.  I am curious about the nature and value, if any, of this addicting habit.

 

Song of the Week

Remembering History

Last night, I entertained eleven friends with dinner at my house.  It only seemed natural to go around the table and see what everybody was doing 50 years ago on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot.  Ten of us were in school at various levels, one was beyond school and working, and one of the women, Elena, was not yet born in 1963.  The stories were pretty standard except that three of these people were immigrants.  Deeb was in Bethlehem at the time, and he remembers one of the teachers running into the room with the news.  Ian was born in Scotland.  His memories didn’t mesh with the times he was getting from those of us from the states, so he questioned the accuracy of his memories. 

Fifty years ago today and I am speechless, reduced to clichés.  We were clustered around our one television set pondering the power of one second to change what we knew.

This quotation comes from a review in The Economist of Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing by Lynne Segal. 

“The great secret that all old people share,” observed Doris Lessing, a Nobel prize-winning author, at 73, is that “your body changes, but you don’t change at all.” The effect is confusing, she explained—no less so, surely, now that she is 94 [until her death two days ago]. Old age often brings loneliness and sadness, but also a greater appreciation of the transience of all things—a thought that can be moving, not just depressing.  

Dreamy. Soothing. Knitting?

The Dish posted this quotation form Jenny Diski’s longarticle on knitting.  As someone who meditates and goes to the gym, I was interested in her comparisons.  Maybe when I have time, I’ll read her whole article.  Maybe I'll finish knitting the scarf I started two years ago.

As everyone says who knits, there is a dreamy, calming pleasure to knitting. You want to do more. The edges of anxiety are rounded off, you can feel the drip of endorphins soothing the rat in the solar plexus. Needles clicking, mind half on the pattern, half drifting. People liken it to meditation and gym work. I’ve done both, and it’s true. Trancelike sometimes. That simple repetitive work with the hands has a tranquillising effect is not a new insight, but it does work.

Song of the Week

I remember a few years ago it seemed that everywhere I turned, I would hear Pachelbel Canon.  Now it's been years since I heard it.  Until yesterday.  I was writing in my notebook at the Main Street Coffee house.  This place was full of conversation and rattling dishes.  And then, under all the other noise, I heard it, as if it was playing secretly.  Sweet.

Writing My Heart Out

On October 31, I wrote that November is National Novel Writing Month.  The challenge is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.  That’s short as novels go, but it’s a lot to do in a month.  So far I’m on schedule.  Last Sunday was very busy but I was a few hundred words ahead so I caught up in a couple of days. 

This has been a surprisingly energizing project.  That’s one reason I like it.  The other reason is surprises.  On Tuesday, my protagonist, during a phone call to his girlfriend, asked her to marry him.  I didn’t see it coming, but it felt right.

Most of us have experienced getting lost in a novel.  It’s even more intense when the novel you get lost in is one you are writing.

I’ve passed the halfway mark.  But I still don’t know if I’ll be writing on November 30.  Mostly, I just take it one day at a time.

And you say you never win anything...

I have often contemplated the amazing coincidences that led to my birth, so I was delighted to read this by Tim Maudlin. 

It can be unsettling to contemplate the unlikely nature of your own existence, to work backward causally and discover the chain of blind luck that landed you in front of your computer screen, or your mobile, or wherever it is that you are reading these words. For you to exist at all, your parents had to meet, and that alone involved quite a lot of chance and coincidence. If your mother hadn’t decided to take that calculus class, or if her parents had decided to live in another town, then perhaps your parents never would have encountered one another. But that is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Even if your parents made a deliberate decision to have a child, the odds of your particular sperm finding your particular egg are one in several billion. The same goes for both your parents, who had to exist in order for you to exist, and so already, after just two generations, we are up to one chance in 10²⁷. Carrying on in this way, your chance of existing, given the general state of the universe even a few centuries ago, was almost infinitesimally small. You and I and every other human being are the products of chance, and came into existence against very long odds.

I'm glad I made it through the odds.  I'm enjoying this life.  But if I hadn't been born, I wouldn't have minded would I?

Sunday Song (on Monday): Nourishing the Corny Side

Fall Back and Spring Forward

For years, my state of Indiana in the Eastern Time Zone stayed on the same time all year round.  Here in South Bend, during the summer, we were in the same zone as our Central Time Zone neighbors in Chicago, and in the winter, we were in the same zone as our Michigan Eastern time zone neighbors.  In 2006, we adopted daylight savings time, and it is still a subject of controversy.  So, Sunday, setting back my clock, I thought of it as a futile attempt to have more daylight when there is only so much daylight to have.  Whether you like to have the extra daylight in morning or evening seems more a matter of preference than anything else. Personally, I liked it when we didn’t change, but I was surprised that, when we switched to Daylight Savings Time, I also like summer nights where daylight lasted until 9:30 PM.

Allison Schrager has a different kind of proposal to what seems these days like sacred dogma:

This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. After that we won’t change our clocks again—no more daylight saving. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States. The east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. Anyone who lives on one coast and does business with the other can imagine the uncountable benefits of living in a two-time-zone nation (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).

I think I could like it.

(Another blog idea from the Dish.  The history of time in Indiana here.)

Resisting Obamacare

I can’t resist this powerful, partisan, political commentary from Michael Tomasky:

Someone I know asked the other day: Has there ever been a law in the history of the country as aggressively resisted by the political opposition as this? Republicans didn’t do this with Social Security. Most of them voted for Social Security. They didn’t do it with Medicare. They, and the Southern racists who were then Democrats, didn’t do it with civil rights. There was a fair amount of on-the-ground opposition to that, but it wasn’t orchestrated at the national level like this was. And when the Voting Rights Act was passed the year after civil rights, Southern states in fact fell in line quickly. Check the black voter-registration figures from Southern states in 1964 versus 1966. It’s pretty amazing. 

No, to find obstinacy like this, you have to go back, yes, to the pre-Civil War era. The tariff of 1828, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which led to the civil war in “Bloody Kansas” and ultimately to the Civil War itself. Not  comforting thought. But it’s where we are.

(Thanks Sullydish) 

Sunday Song: Selfish Jean

I am rereading parts of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.  I was Googling for a review and came upon this song, “Selfish Jean,” which, under the circumstances, I love.  And the video is pretty entertaining too.

Another Well-Known Poet Writes Poems about Dogs

This morning while driving my car, I heard Billy Collins read the second poem on this video.  Collins has a nice voice;  the poem was a surprise.

What's your sign?

I’m not a horoscope person, not unless the horoscope is from Bob Brezsny’s Freewill Astrology.  And of course, at best, my Freewill Astrology horoscope could fit anyone with sort of a goofy wisdom.  So here’s my Libra horoscope for this week:  

What do you think you'd be like if you were among the one-percent-wealthiest people on Earth? Would you demand that your government raise your taxes so you could contribute more to our collective well-being? Would you live simply and cheaply so you'd have more money to donate to charities and other worthy causes? This Halloween season, I suggest you play around with fantasies like that -- maybe even masquerade as an incredibly rich philanthropist who doles out cash and gifts everywhere you go. At the very least, imagine what it would be like if you had everything you needed and felt so grateful you shared your abundance freely. 

I like it.