Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Ponder this

Today I met a guy who owns a laundromat. He didn't always own it; at one point he was an engineer at Rocky Flats–highly paid and working 12-hour days. Then Rocky Flats closed. He did a little of this, a little of that, then one day in Leadville he went into a laundromat to clean his clothes and came out as a small business owner. I asked him how he liked it, and he said he loved it.

Just something to think about.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Life Pruning

Sometimes I just want to abandon everything and become a monk. Just sit and worry about nothing other than achieving enlightenment. But ultimately, I know that's not for me. I like common life, but I remember when I got back from my last retreat I felt crippled by all the things I had to keep straight to live normally. It's amazing people do as well as they do with so many things to worry about. It's not surprising that they may snap from time to time. The ironic thing about my case is that all my anguish comes from having too many good things in life. I truly like all the things I do, it's just that I do too many things. There aren't enough hours in the day and days in the week to fit all the life I want to live. I've been on a solid hiatus from playing music, because when I sit down at the piano it's hard to not think about all the other things I could be doing and simply enjoy playing the piano. It comes down to prioritizing. For example, I just suspended my subscription to the New York Times. It only took about 30 minutes to read what I was interested in, but then some days I wouldn't even have those 30 minutes and the paper would be a dead, guilt-inducing weight in my backpack. So that's gone, and I feel better for it. The next casualty, I'm afraid, may be climbing. I'm about to begin a yoga teacher training, which will be a major time and brain drain (in a good way), and a climbing gym membership is a time-consuming thing to make worth it. So bye bye, climbing, for now. What else? I have to eat. Reading stays. I've already cut my sleep time down the minimum necessary. It's so odd that time can be simultaneously infinite and in such short supply. I'll just try to remember the wisdom from the Tao De Ching: Nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished