Scientific Ink

Category: Life

  • Grateful for unexpected gifts – gratitude week 1, 2008

    Rudraksha beadA new acquaintance at my meditation center handed me this rudraksha bead. Anu divided up a necklace that had been her grandmother’s, and she gave individual beads to members of a group of 20s-30s folks who meet in a sadhana circle once a month. She opened her purse to pull out a bag holding a set of beads, and this one fell out and rolled across the floor towards where I was sitting. It feels good around my neck.

    A rudraksha bead is the seed from a plant that grows in the Himalayan foothills. By legend, the tree sprung up from the tears of Shiva, shed in compassion for the welfare of all. The seeds bring material and spiritual well-being. Rudraksha beads are typically used as prayer beads, in japa malas used in the repetition of a mantra.

    I’ll wear this rudraksha pendant to remind me of my intention to be grateful. What better to remind me than an unexpected gift.

  • My intention for 2008: to live in gratitude

    Christmas 2005 photos 011I made a resolution and an intention for 2008. The intention is the higher goal, the filter I’ll use to make decisions (“will this action/purchase/choice help me to live in gratitude?”). I would suppose that the resolution would be more along the lines of a tactic or an action plan. I made them in the right order (intention first, resolution second), though I am writing about them in backwards order.

    My intention for 2008 is to live in gratitude. I’ve already started writing gratitude-themed posts (such as my post about the people that were my personal highlights of 2007). Gratitude makes my life better, some folks recognize it is as useful as meditation. Gratitude resets my mood by giving me practice in positivity, and it reminds me to embrace the people and the events and the things that matter to me, that make me happy. And embracing these things increases my connection to them, a happy spiral.

    When I’m losing my mind, I withdraw. I’ve always done this. In high school I’d leave the table with my friends and go sit next to my locker, and like it. And after several days of this, I’d feel sad to be alone, neglected, and a bit resentful. Gratitude helps me break out of my self-imposed withdrawl.

    When I’m losing my mind, I get critical of myself and of others. I want myself and others to be what we’re not, and in these moments I forget to appreciate all that I am, all that others are. Gratitude helps me reconnect to how things are, not how I want them to be.

    So, I’ll be posting each week on gratitude to help me keep it in mind and to deepen my understanding of the practice.

  • New Year’s Resolution – enjoy my weekends

    CalendarI thought a lot about my resolution this year. I’d like it to be challenging, but not obviously impossible so I don’t set myself up for failure. I decided I’m going to work on better enjoying my weekends.

    I like the structure and the rhythm of the workday. It organizes my restless energy in a way that unstructured open time does not. The weekend does weird things to me. I meditate every weekday before work. Even though I have all day each weekend day, I typically never quite get to meditating on the weekend. There’s something too easy about procrastinating the important stuff with unstructured time. Somehow I don’t do the things I know will make me happy (meditation, exercise) and instead feel restless and bored. As awful as it sounds, I think I need to schedule my weekends a little bit!

    I felt relieved/vindicated when I saw a recent lifehack.org post “12 Tips to Improve the Quality of Your Free Time” that discussed how people confess that they “felt happier on the job, even though they said they would rather be at home.”

    So this year I am resolving to improve my free time. I am not planning to work on the weekend, that seems like a cop-out. Instead, I want to be a bit more intentional and systematic about my free time. Not super structured, I just want to make sure that I give myself just enough structure to do what I want. Specifically, along with the previously scheduled exercise and housework I want to plan in some activities:

    • find some nonpunitive and relaxing beauty ritual I like,
    • schedule a longer meditation 1x/weekend,
    • study yoga more seriously,
    • read,
    • make sure I get outside – take a long walk in the snow, cross country ski on the golf course (I miss having Gillian around for a ski and conversation partner, I need to locate a stand-in),
    • put some of that restless energy to good use by volunteering somewhere, and
    • scheduling some creative time gardening, cooking, knitting, writing, photography.

    I’m going to start small, by scheduling a few things in advance on weekends this January. I’ll blocking some time for creative activities (garden planning, figuring out what to do with the fuzzy fuschia yarn that has refused to become a raglan crewneck sweater), signing up for a class: winter photography at the Botanical Gardens 1/20/2007, and checking out some local Sierra Club events. That’s probably plenty for now.

  • Best gift – Silence

    I completely got away with something this year. I gave my husband something that will actually improve my own sanity and well being.

    Dave and I get along, but we have pretty different leisure pursuits. He likes first person shooter, sports, and car racing computer games. He also watches some movies and TV shows I think are “too violent”. He’s not a bad guy, and you have to appreciate that I am a very sensitive person. The moment when Bambi’s mom dies in the snow is right on the edge for me. I like yoga, reading, writing, and thinking. I do yoga in the room next to the TV. And we have a cat, so closed doors are not tolerated.

    So, even when I’m not in the same room, the sounds of his fun disturb me. I realize if I were enlightened, I wouldn’t notice the sniper fire during my savasana, but until I reach nirvana I require quiet to relax. His leisure pursuits give me an unwelcome background soundtrack of revving engines, squealing tires, or, worse, rat-a-tat machine gun fire and endless repetition of stock phrases. It gets to the point where I walk into the study and plead for no more “fire in the hole!”

    Every so often I go on a tirade about this, and he responded by asking for some nice wireless surround sound headphones. I should feel bad about giving him something so obviously for me, but he got himself an XBox 360 for Christmas, so there really wasn’t any way I could compete. Today I had the joy of asking him to please put on his fancy new headphones so I didn’t have to partake in whatever loud thing was happening on the game console.

    Wow. Silence. Imagine!

  • Hard drive crash, meh


    Nerf darts pepper a whiteboard, originally uploaded by Own Page One.

    So my work laptop’s hard drive died last week, on Thursday, my first day back after the holiday. I had dropped it in June and it was predicted the hard drive would go as a result, so I had tried to be mindful about what was on it and what was backed up. Computer gremlins intervened, however, the backup program I was using was timing out and not backing up the computer, so I hadn’t had a full backup of the files and settings in a few months.

    This hard drive loss, however, was the best ever. I think it isn’t because of any special precautions I took, but more because the way I use my computer has changed. Essentially, I’m now in the habit of relying on external vendors to do my backups for me (web applications that as part of their service commitment do redundant backups themselves).

    • Documents. I don’t store anything in the documents folders that isn’t also stored on Basecamp (our project management software). It’s not perfect version control, but I treat basecamp as the source of current files, and pull down from there when it is time to edit again, ignoring the files I’ve stored, and often tossing the file once it has been uploaded.
    • Music. I suppose I’m still old fashioned, I buy my music on CD, so when the digital files get blown away, all I lose is the time invested to rip them.
    • Photographs. I shoot digital now, after resisting giving up my film camera for a long time (what am I supposed to do with it now???!). I post the better shots onto my flickr account. Because I have a pro account, I have no bandwidth limits, and I can archive my photos there. This isn’t perfect, flickr wants jpegs and my camera gives me RAW files, so I do lose something in the translation (I’m not storing the original files). But, I’m no photoshop jockey, and huge jpegs are good enough for the quality of my photography.
    • Bookmarks. I don’t really use my browsers to store bookmarks anymore. I archive links on del.icio.us and when I need them again, find them there. I do put a few frequently accessed sites into the bookmarks toolbar, but that’s just to save typing. I know those URLs by heart. So, nothing lost there.
    • Email. I’m using IMAP settings for my email, so there was essentially no break as I hopped to a surrogate computer for a few hours while the local Genius Bar replaced my hard drive.
    • Settings and Software. This was what took the longest to recover, but it wasn’t too bad, a few hours.

    All this made me wonder about our home desktop. Although my husband assures me our computer backs itself up to another hard drive rather continuously, I’m following my own best practices and uploading saved photographs to flickr. This has a side benefit of reminding me of some of the great places I’ve been (Yellowstone, Banff) and good people I know (Geoff, Andy to name a few). Hmmm, why don’t I work for a place that sends me to cool mountainous national parks anymore?! Anyway, the hard drive crash has given me a holiday gift – fond memories!

  • Looking back on 2007

    These things and people gave me a good 2007.

    • My mom’s health.
    • Stephen for teaching me an awful lot about the web and making some cool sites.
    • Kraig for making things happen.
    • Chris W. for all his help.
    • Andy and Brent and Mark for cheery heart.
    • Dan for the big picture.
    • Chris G. for his insight and clarity.
    • Helene for inspiration.
    • Daniel and JP at Pure Visibility for making me feel welcome and helping me be useful there.
    • Patrick at PV for his thoughtfulness.
    • Dave B. and Maria for their easygoing positivity.
    • Ed for the opportunity.
    • Linda and Catherine at PV for making a great place to work.
    • Beverly for cultural events and dinner parties, especially her amazing paella.
    • Vici for understanding.
    • Sue for caring for Floyd and for everyone.
    • Chrissy for long talks and also for Theo and Becca.
    • My Dave for keeping a roof over my head during my wanderings, but mostly for taking the edge off by making me laugh.