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Trying to Explain Gratitude

Monday, August 30, 2010

What I love most about running is that it frames the rest of my life.

What I mean is that, for a person who has the freedom to do just about anything he wants, running provides boundaries. Running lets me know I should go to bed on time, I shouldn’t eat that cheeseburger, I shouldn’t drink six beers. Decisions from the night/day before directly impact my ability to run the next day, and oh do I feel it.

I also like the way running slows things down for me. I have a life packed with stuff, and for an hour a day at least, I look at things at an 8 MPH pace, which is slow enough to notice what kind of plants inhabit the side of the road, what houses are for sale or what businesses seem to be doing well. It’s fast enough that I can lock eyes with the girl jonesing on the park bench in Albany, but I don’t have to linger to talk to her. It’s fast enough that I can see most of a neighborhood (within a 5 mile radius) so that I have a sense of what it is, who lives there, whether or not I want to go back.

Since I’ve been spending more time in Monroe with the distillery, I’ve been running along Territorial Highway and HWY 99W around Corvallis. It’s beautiful out here, and I wish the shoulders on the various roads were a little more friendly to non-motorized traffic. As the different growing seasons pass, the air is full of mint, honeysuckle and lavender. (Yeah, I don’t suffer allergies.) I’m contemplating getting some sort of running backpack so I can carry a camera and capture some of the gorgeous scenery out here.

Will and I hiked Brice Creek trail this morning, and as we sat on a log peering into the woods, a guy ran past along the trail. That looked awesome to me.

We were taking about a number of things, one of them being gratitude. For some reason Will asked me about the happiest moment I had experienced. He asked me if the day his mom and I got married was really happy (his mom recently became engaged) and I said yes, it definitely was.

I told him that we’re lucky to have great things in our lives, lucky to be here at all, and it’s important to enjoy things while we have them. There’s no guarantee how long something will last. What around you lasts forever? If we enjoy things while we have them, we’ll be much happier.

I think he absorbed this. I had to relate it to video games for it to make sense to him. He agreed with the importance of focusing on things you have, not what you don’t. Then we started talking about his future game company “Flaming Dolphin” and it’s lineup of games. He cracks me up.

Running helps me stay in the moment. I’ve been running distance since I was 18, when the army made me do it. Since then, I’ve been fortunate that I can pick it back up pretty easily after a break. What I’ve learned is that once I get back into the five mile range, six and seven are what feel really good. Two miles in, I start to feel excellent. It might be the high, but I think it’s the experience of travelling on your own feet, the sensation of travelling becomes central. The last two miles are the best. I love ending on a sprint  until I’m wandering around some parking lot, or down a sidewalk, huffing and high.

Some of the best moments I’ve had have been following runs. When I first left the army, I ran along Amazon trail into downtown Eugene, past people going about their day, and I felt so grateful to be free and able to do that. I ended back at South Eugene High School. It was Februrary and crisply cold and on this particular sidewalk there were still some leaves blowing around. I kicked through them as I reached my end point. It felt awesome.

A friend of mine recently said that he’d decided he wanted to die by being shot up with heroin and then jumping a motorcycle into a volcano. While that does sound like quite a spectacle, I think I would rather simply die of a heart attack while running. A flash of bright white light in the middle of a heaving breath, travelling forward.

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Sometimes unconditional love hurts like a motherfucker.

Saturday, July 17, 2010
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I am upgrading to a dumbphone

Saturday, July 17, 2010

I’ve owned an iPhone for the last two years. The extent to which it has infiltrated my life has been insidious. I think about what I might be missing, information-wise, all the time. I am not comfortable unless the phone is sitting somewhere that I can see it, so I know if I’ve missed something or not. In result, I don’t focus on what is directly in front of me. If I force myself to not think about the phone, I end of thinking about the phone. Checking it results in one of those small orgiastic experiences that are best left to cold water on a hot day, or really good dessert from Sweet Life.

I commute about 80 miles every work day, and the phone finds itself continuously in my right hand, resting on the gear shift, where I can glance at it and, yes I know, read the internet. This is very dangerous. The first night I had the phone I ran a red light because I was look at it rather than watching what was in front of me. Of course there was a cop behind me, and his lights whirred into action in my rearview. When he came up to the window, the phone was in my glovebox. He asked if I knew why he had stopped me. I admitted that I did know. So he nodded, told me he had to be somewhere else, and said not to do it again. Lesson not learned.

There have only been a few sudden stops due to the phone. During the times I consciously don’t use the phone, I see everyone else on the freeway reading their phones. Everyone is glancing down at some small screen in their hands as they sail at 70 MPH dow the road, driving with their peripheral vision, I guess.

This constant need for data bombards what I think of as my surface mind, the part of me that is focused on the world around me. Constant snippets of information distract me from the real world happening around me, drawing my attention from important things like my job, the people around me, the woman standing in line next to me at Starbucks. Having the phone in my hand is a constant excuse to escape the world happening right now, to draw my attention and finite resources into an artificial stream of meaninglessness. I don’t need to read internet comments on some article. I don’t need to research dual sport motorcycles, or read about different types of plate distillation while grocery shopping.

This intrusion into my life doesn’t add quality. It removes clarity.

So my contract with AT+T is up this month, and I won’t be renewing it. I’m going back to a phone that does pretty much one thing: makes calls. I chose an LG Dare as my replacement, which has one of the better cameras on a cell phone. I like taking photos and uploading them. I think I’ll get back to doing more of that. I prefer being a creator of things rather than a passive consumer of the endless stream of meaninglessness. Somebody else can placate themselves on the details of my existence. I would rather send than receive.

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I was asked what makes me happy

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

I think happiness is a slippery concept to truly hold onto.

For me, it doesn’t capture the quality of what you learn from life: from being sad, from being in pain, from struggle and growth, passion and pleasure, and all the other things that wouldn’t be defined as “happy” experiences at the time. Instead, I try to appreciate.

As I truly think about how I feel about my life, my experiences are happening in individual moments, and I have feelings about those moments as they come. I am uncomfortable, I am challenged, I am warm, I am cold, I am content. And then when I look back on those moments, and memory smooths them out, I feel something different. I know how things turn out, or I don’t, but I can evaluate them from a distance and “happy” becomes more possible.

The thing is, I don’t want to feel trapped. The “happiest” people I’ve met are those who get to make their own decisions about their lives. Even if they’re business-owners weighed down by heavy obligations, or battalion commanders carrying heavy responsibilities, they are where they want to be, and the struggle is part of their freedom. They chose to be there. Difficulty, pain, getting up every day – are part of the lives they chose.

When you don’t make conscious decisions about what you want to do with your one-and-only life, I think you rapidly find yourself trapped. When I think about the one decision I made when I was 17 to join the army, I didn’t think carefully about how it would impact the next twelve years of my life, and all the people around me – but because I never owned the decision, I allowed myself to feel trapped by it.

I tell myself all the time that I will never say “I’m sorry” again. I hate saying it at work to customers about something the company did because I’m not sorry. If I make the right decisions, and do the right things, I have no need to ever be sorry. If I hurt, it’s because I made a decision that caused me to hurt. I chose. No one else inflicted it upon me.

I digress; but I believe in thinking carefully about things now, making the right decisions, letting the right people into my life. Having a plan. Buying a trailer? It’s the first step in buying property three years from now and building a house on it as soon as possible afterward. A house I design. Choosing to put my resources into the business instead of a property? The business will give return, whereas the house will only net return if I choose to sell it. The business is teaching me things, introducing me to people, giving me access to a world I wasn’t sure how to enter before: all the people in Eugene/etc who are really making things happen. I’m not going to learn anything from the worker-bees. I don’t want to be a worker-bee.

As I try to appreciate the things in my life, I recognize that they don’t last forever. I don’t take them for granted. Things and people and experiences enter your life and leave. It’s okay to say it’s time to move onto something else. Otherwise you never grow. But if you’re present and appreciative of the things here, right now, you know those moments will be more meaningful. Feeling appreciation makes me happy.

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Running and Biking in JC

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Will and I went for a short 3 mile run/bike in JC this morning. Gorgeous day.

I wish this city would get its act together with sidewalks. They end randomly, don’t have on-ramps and in several places people have been allowed to put obstacles like newspaper recycling bins in the middle of the way. A person in a wheelchair would be forced to move onto the street.

I’ve been thinking about handicap access lately because I’ve had two people approach me at work to point out ways our parking lot wasn’t in compliance. Both instances were easily fixable if someone had been looking with the right eyes.

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