Tag: Stress

What a beautiful balloon I’m carrying with me.

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So you were dealing with the feelings we talked about earlier, and you got to a point where you decided your life had to change. One of the things that then changed your life was birding. How did you find it? In the spring of 2023, just before I left The Atlantic, I moved to Oakland from D.C., and one thing that happened was I started paying attention to the birds around me. They were omnipresent in a way they weren’t before. On my first day in my new house, there was an Anna’s hummingbird in the garden. I would go for walks and hear birdsong: the melodious sound of a Pacific wren in a nearby redwood forest. I bought a pair of binoculars and would take it with me on neighborhood walks or hikes. I would have Merlin while I was working and look up occasionally and go: “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s an oak titmouse. I’ve never seen one before.” To me, the difference between being casually bird-curious and being an actual birder is making a specific effort to go and look at birds.

Going from passive to active. Exactly. So early September of 2023 was when I made my first trip to a local wetland to specifically look at birds and nothing else. That was, honestly, a life-changing moment.

Continue reading “What a beautiful balloon I’m carrying with me.” →

Hmmmmm…

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Of his 16 daily waking hours, Deepak Chopra spends four or five meditating. He never gets bored, he said, and he never experiences stress. His only vice is an addiction to yoga. “I’m happy all the time,” said Chopra, 78…

“The people who say they don’t have time, they’re not busy, they’re just scattered. If you’re present, there’s no fatigue. As soon as you think of what’s next, there’s fatigue. As soon as you think “I shouldn’t have done that,” there’s fatigue…”

“I don’t get stressed…”

“Pleasure is overrated…”

“I’m enjoying myself all the time. I don’t have to do anything special…”

— Deepak Chopra, interviewed by Lane Florsheim in “Deepak Chopra Doesn’t Believe You’re Too Busy to Meditate” (wsj.com, November 18 2024)

Walking. In the Fog of War.

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6 a.m. And I’m off. It’s now 1,313 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.

It’s been a while. Self: A while for what you might ask? 

I’m losing steam. Excelling at Lethargy. Or Lori’s big 6 letter word: Torpor.

Blogging is now less than an intermittent hobby.  

And — I’ve started what, 4, or is it 5 new books? And set them all aside. Can’t seem to engage, can’t seem to get a footing — I put them all down. And even more confounding, I could care less.

I shift to Audible, and I find myself 35 minutes in, with no recollection of anything I’ve just listened to. 

Sawsan throws a jab in a text message, it lands, I don’t even feel it, but it’s good to let her feel like she’s won one — I get lost in her science of poetry and tattoos. It’s like I’m swimming in a fully body Novocain bath.

Early this week, Susan announced that she had two big goals for 2024. She stared at me, expecting a response on my New Year’s Resolutions, and my response? Silence. I got nothing.

I look up at Wally sleeping next to me on couch. I snap the shot, the one above. Peaceful little guy seems to have it figured out while I’m wallowing (wallying?) around.

Continue reading “Walking. In the Fog of War.” →

Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call

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A few months ago, I was teetering on the brink of feeling overwhelmed by life’s responsibilities, afflicted by the ambient anxiety that seems to be an intrinsic part of life in the 2020s. In an effort to maintain — or maybe restore — my sanity, I embarked on a personal endurance challenge.

Other people, at similar moments, begin competing in grueling triathlons, or head off on intensive meditation retreats. Me? I decided to give up listening to podcasts or music while running, or driving, or loading the dishwasher, or doing almost anything else. To just focus, in other words, on what it was I was actually doing, one activity at a time.

It was surprisingly hard. Once you’ve finished mocking me for treating such a trifling alteration to my habits like a grand existential struggle, I have one request: Try it. Identify the small tricks you use to avoid being fully present with whatever you’re doing, and put them aside for a week or two.

You may discover, as I did, that you were unwittingly addicted to not doing one thing at a time. You might even come to agree with me that restoring our capacity to live sequentially — that is, focusing on one thing after another, in turn, and enduring the confrontation with our human limitations that this inherently entails — may be among the most crucial skills for thriving in the uncertain, crisis-prone future we all face. […]

At work, the way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one. “This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker in his book “The Effective Executive.” “They do only one at a time.” Making a difference in one domain requires giving yourself permission not to care equally about all the others. […]

Instead, you can pour your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that truly count. You’ll enjoy things more, into the bargain. My gratifying new ability to “be here now” while running or driving or cooking dinner isn’t the result of having developed any great spiritual prowess. Rather, it’s a matter of realizing I could only ever be here now anyway — so I might as well give up the stressful struggle to pretend otherwise.

— Oliver Burkeman, from “Today’s Superpower Is Doing One Thing at a Time” (The New York Times · July 29, 2023). Burkeman is the author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Modern life has clogged my skull to the limit. Technology has delivered an avalanche of options to preoccupy me at any hour; the notion of idle time that can’t be filled with some form of digital distraction is foreign to me, almost unnerving.

If you’re reading this column on a phone, or any sort of computer, you’re seconds away from all kinds of diversions—social media, digital games, the state of your 401(k), the latest celebrity embarrassment or political mess…

For me, the problem comes when I need to think for myself. If you read this column, you know that any kind of complicated thinking is hard for me, and perhaps impossible. My brain’s interior is not a series of mathematical formulas dancing around balletically, like it does for beautiful-minded geniuses in the movies. My brain is more like a slop-sink faucet, slowly dripping. Or an arcade machine that only plays 70’s-era Pong…

As I get older, I realize I need to utterly unplug. My ideas will not come from my phone, a Facebook post or the latest tire fire on Twitter. For me, they come from digital distance, from oxygen and exercise and especially from time spent outdoors. There once was a time I could get ideas from staring at websites, but not anymore. I get them from looking at trees…

I fear we’re getting worse. Technology just gets better, as those airport bookstores get smaller. I’m wary of our artificial-intelligence future, and the notion that we will lean on bots to think for us, writing code, speeches and even poetry. It sounds like more off-loading of our brain space to technology. And to what end? To watch more episodes of “Love Is Blind?”

I don’t want to sound like I’ve figured it out. I’m not saying this brain of mine is on the cusp of a breakthrough. My brain will not save the world. It barely remembers why it went to the supermarket.

But to get anywhere real, it needs to be uncluttered. It needs to be empty. I mean empty more than the usual. It needs to be bored. And for me that means: unplugged.

—  Jason Gay, from “The Joy of a Totally Empty Brain. Modern distractions cannot compete with the inspiration of old fashioned boredom (wsj.com, April 21, 2023)