Being

New Years has past, resolutions have been made — and probably forgotten. I’d like to suggest a revision. This year’s resolution should be simply, be in the moment. Make each moment count. This is what drew me to Chado, The Way of Tea. Chanoyu is about the details of making the best possible bowl of tea for your guests.

I have been privileged. What I have imagined, I have been able to accomplish. But in my twenties, I was at a dead end. I covered up shear laziness with, as it is now called, content. Day after day passed without any foreseeable change.

The “5 Year Plans” of the communist countries back when they were still waving around Mao’s Little Red Book and Das Kapital made sense to me. Secretly I began to formulate my own five year goals and I started to pay attention to the details. It was more a subconscious endeavor than a conspicuous one. No goal was every written down, nor did I inform anyone else of my plans.

Details are what count in a life. Good or bad, without them we are just empty shells. A life spent absorbing others content and not creating your own, well I do not want to contemplate that. Dreams are a good judge. Tumultuous dreams, disturbing dreams, Technicolor dreams, contradictory dreams; such dreams reveal the brain hard at work deciphering your content.

Rather than blotting the dreams out, I relished them. Granted I do not always think this at 3:30 in the morning waking up due to a particularly complicated dream. But I am grateful that my mind thinks my life is worthy enough to require this level of sorting out.

Of course, I cannot claim these thoughts as my own. They are a conglomeration of ideas gathered from D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, e. e. cummings, Sen no Rikyu, Basho, Bach, and Mahler to name a few. And my rudimentary understanding of Zen influences these ideas. Zen is a real life construct, even if it is full of contradictions.

People practice by sitting in zazen for hours, by playing obscure notes on the shakuhachi, by whisking a bowl of tea, by slinging arrows towards nonexistent targets. It makes little sense and matters even less. The pixels I manipulate to write this can exist in different fonts but they still create words and meaning.

The plan, the details, and the doing are essential. The plan can be vague but the details should be vivid, and the doing, well that is the key.

These are momentous times. There are many distractions. Climate change, terrorism, failed states, police and neighborhood violence, technology run amuck are just a few. It can be numbing. Resist them even at the risk of being uninformed.

Spend 2016 being in the moment. Soak in life’s details. Dream complicated dreams. As it was said in the 70’s, let your freak flag fly. And above all, forget I ever wrote this!

Time

There is nothing new under the sun. Well, there is nothing new 90 million miles from the sun. I have reached the age where I can say this with some authority. Of course, there are many new devices, many new molecules, many new technologies, and we humans have a much better understanding of our own physiology and of how to manipulate it. I mean there is nothing new in our behavior.

There is certainly newness in the speed and the amount of information that comes our way. Most, even if it seems important, isn’t. But how are we to know that and so, every beep or wiggle of a device requires a response. A response even if the response is to ignore it. The brain fires off another couple of million neurons whether we answer or not.

It is tragic to grow up in the clutches of pervasive technology. With how absorbed the populace is with a life lived on a small screen I am surprised any one continues to shop. Why do we need things when we live a life through an LED screen. We can stay home and cuddle up to the warmth of a discharging lithium battery.

Do not think for a moment that I am not bound up in this culture, less than most but more than others. I remember my first brush with technology: a HP 12C calculator. What an esoteric devise. It uses RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) which makes calculating easier by eliminating steps.

Before that, I tried to program a Commodore computer with Basic, the language of the day. The storage was on a cassette tape. I learned early on that I was not interested the programing but in what it could do for me.

Several years later a friend dropped off his Macintosh for me to computer sit while he went to Jamaica for a couple of weeks. It was like a pet. It was certainly cute, it even purred. I asked for the instructions and he tossed me a quarter inch thick spiral bound manual that resembled more of a child’s book than the portal to a sophisticated machine.

I thumbed through the pages before turning it on and I have since regretted ever having to use a PC. Not that the Mac was/is without frustration but there was no looking back. My MacBook Air is one of several things that I usually try not to let out of my sight. It is used to write, shop, research, navigate, communicate, read, check the weather, and listen to whomever or wherever my musical taste lead me. If there were a fire, it’s what I would grab first…well, after my wife that is.

Now that is tragic. To have so much invested in a chunk of aluminum, lithium, and various other rare earths. After Google Earth-ing my entire summer cruise I actually thought do I need to burn the diesel, haven’t I already seen what there is to see. Should I sell the boat and invest in a faster processor and a 3-D screen.
Like I said, this is tragic. In the First Part of King Henry IV, Shakespeare’s character Hotspur says, when confronted by a messenger bearing letters, “ I cannot read them now. O gentlemen! the time of life is short; To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial’s point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour.” In English, to waste even an hour is too long.

It may be time for the world to make a New Year’s Resolution: Less screen time, and more face time. Get the word out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Tumblr, and Pinterest…Tragic!

January 2016