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Today is my birthday! I am 39 years old.
I think this is the first birthday since I've started celebrating them that doesn't really feel all that special. I think it took about ten years to get the big celebratory birthday party thing out of my system, which feels about right. Today, I want to simply keep building good habits, have good conversations with great friends, and maybe indulge in a slice of cake and ice cream. :)
Ryan bought a meditation book about a month ago that I found interesting and began reading immediately. It's called "The Illuminated Mind", and it aims to be a marriage between the Eastern and Western views of meditation. The author breaks the practice down into ten stages, each with identifiable markers that let you know where you are with your concentration. I'm not thoroughly convinced by this, but he does provide a really interesting framework to think about the practice and how meditation can be applied off the couch.
Right now he is dealing with the distinction between focused attention and peripheral awareness. According to him, these are two halves of our whole perception that rely on each other for an accurate reading of the world around us. Each half has its own purpose, but can't do its job effectively if there's not balance between them. What meditation does is allows us to direct and sustain our focused attention, but ALSO expand and strengthen our peripheral awareness. So the theory goes, we learn how to concentrate better but we also learn how to better recognize the context in which we view the object of our focus.
This leads to a less-subjective and egocentric slant to our focus. If someone is mean to us, our peripheral awareness provides us better information about the context of that behavior so that we can incorporate it into our interpretation of that scenario. We learn that a lot of the worst behavior directed at us isn't necessarily personal, but the result of the other person's story unfolding in their head. Instead of responding from that flare of emotion, we can decide how best to nudge the other person's story along. THAT is my best self -- being attuned to the flow of emotion around me and learning how to direct it to its best effect.
We watched the first half of the second series of "Fleabag" last night, and my goodness is it as good as ever. "Fleabag" is an Amazon Prime show in the fine British tradition of short but perfectly-contained series. Each series is six episodes of 30 minutes, so it's eminently bingeable. It's about a woman whose life is out of control after the "accidental" suicide of her best friend; now she has to deal with her emotionally-stunted family and the failing cafe they opened together. The first series leans into Fleabag using sex as a coping mechanism and the problems that causes; the second series swerves into a different realm that's still complicated, frank, and hilarious.
I don't quite know how to talk about it to the public at large, but "Fleabag" strikes me as the kind of show we'd have more of in a just world. The women are varied and fully-formed, while the men are ironically enough the bit players -- ridiculous and silly, object lessons in Fleabag's journey to deal with her trauma. Series two already had two stand-out episodes; the premiere which takes place at a family dinner party (it's the first time most of them have seen each other for a year), and the episode where Fleabag caters an important business event for her sister. She meets a successful businesswoman there and they have a frank discussion about the pain women experience as a natural cycle in their lives -- and the older woman then talks about how freeing menopause is once you get past the worst of it. It felt like a window into feminine philosophy that we never get to see in stories. I *loved* it.
I'm bummed that the next time we get together and see it, that's all. The writer and star, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, says that series two is the end of "Fleabag", though the head of Amazon programming says that she's welcome to do whatever she wants there. In the meantime, there's also "Crashing" and "Killing Eve" to watch.
Today, the plan is to spend the morning writing so I can catch up on my Patreon. There's lunch with a friend and former coworker so he can sell me on an open position at his company, and then I'll come back and apply to a few things -- I've got two positions lined up already, and it shouldn't be too hard to find a third. With my revised resume all done, I'm going to turn my attention towards building a better cover letter. In places where I don't really have my foot in the door, every little bit that distinguishes me as a candidate helps, right?
I think this is the first birthday since I've started celebrating them that doesn't really feel all that special. I think it took about ten years to get the big celebratory birthday party thing out of my system, which feels about right. Today, I want to simply keep building good habits, have good conversations with great friends, and maybe indulge in a slice of cake and ice cream. :)
Ryan bought a meditation book about a month ago that I found interesting and began reading immediately. It's called "The Illuminated Mind", and it aims to be a marriage between the Eastern and Western views of meditation. The author breaks the practice down into ten stages, each with identifiable markers that let you know where you are with your concentration. I'm not thoroughly convinced by this, but he does provide a really interesting framework to think about the practice and how meditation can be applied off the couch.
Right now he is dealing with the distinction between focused attention and peripheral awareness. According to him, these are two halves of our whole perception that rely on each other for an accurate reading of the world around us. Each half has its own purpose, but can't do its job effectively if there's not balance between them. What meditation does is allows us to direct and sustain our focused attention, but ALSO expand and strengthen our peripheral awareness. So the theory goes, we learn how to concentrate better but we also learn how to better recognize the context in which we view the object of our focus.
This leads to a less-subjective and egocentric slant to our focus. If someone is mean to us, our peripheral awareness provides us better information about the context of that behavior so that we can incorporate it into our interpretation of that scenario. We learn that a lot of the worst behavior directed at us isn't necessarily personal, but the result of the other person's story unfolding in their head. Instead of responding from that flare of emotion, we can decide how best to nudge the other person's story along. THAT is my best self -- being attuned to the flow of emotion around me and learning how to direct it to its best effect.
We watched the first half of the second series of "Fleabag" last night, and my goodness is it as good as ever. "Fleabag" is an Amazon Prime show in the fine British tradition of short but perfectly-contained series. Each series is six episodes of 30 minutes, so it's eminently bingeable. It's about a woman whose life is out of control after the "accidental" suicide of her best friend; now she has to deal with her emotionally-stunted family and the failing cafe they opened together. The first series leans into Fleabag using sex as a coping mechanism and the problems that causes; the second series swerves into a different realm that's still complicated, frank, and hilarious.
I don't quite know how to talk about it to the public at large, but "Fleabag" strikes me as the kind of show we'd have more of in a just world. The women are varied and fully-formed, while the men are ironically enough the bit players -- ridiculous and silly, object lessons in Fleabag's journey to deal with her trauma. Series two already had two stand-out episodes; the premiere which takes place at a family dinner party (it's the first time most of them have seen each other for a year), and the episode where Fleabag caters an important business event for her sister. She meets a successful businesswoman there and they have a frank discussion about the pain women experience as a natural cycle in their lives -- and the older woman then talks about how freeing menopause is once you get past the worst of it. It felt like a window into feminine philosophy that we never get to see in stories. I *loved* it.
I'm bummed that the next time we get together and see it, that's all. The writer and star, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, says that series two is the end of "Fleabag", though the head of Amazon programming says that she's welcome to do whatever she wants there. In the meantime, there's also "Crashing" and "Killing Eve" to watch.
Today, the plan is to spend the morning writing so I can catch up on my Patreon. There's lunch with a friend and former coworker so he can sell me on an open position at his company, and then I'll come back and apply to a few things -- I've got two positions lined up already, and it shouldn't be too hard to find a third. With my revised resume all done, I'm going to turn my attention towards building a better cover letter. In places where I don't really have my foot in the door, every little bit that distinguishes me as a candidate helps, right?
