frantic ants in a calming world

 

the world doesn’t want us to slow down.

culture doesn’t want us to slow down. the world is waiting for us to slow down. occasionally nature gets a little cranky. but for the most part life outside of humanity is simple. slow. methodical. living day-to-day.

you know those crazy videos of lions chasing wildebeests chasing alligators? that insane two-and-a-half minutes of video probably takes about three-hundred and eighty-seven days of filming nothing.

except for ants. ants are frantically trying to get their shit together. grabbing as much dirt as possible. building mounds that double as flashing neon signs to any predator or small child (*cough*or me*cough*) who wants to kick the dirt and watch them scatter. ants are stupid. and they’re just like many of us. frantically running our lives trying to get our shit together.

when i was looking at mediation as a 30 day quest i surfed around looking for advice and the most often suggested starting meditation was a measly two minutes. two.fucking.minutes. seriously. to be fair meditation isnt new to me so two minutes was out of the question. but try it out. stop reading. close your eyes and start the timer. two minutes. …

…

…

…

if youre new to mediation it can feel like forever.

yet two minutes of meditation is better than doing nothing. it is exponentially better than two minutes of trying to do everything. and truth be told, my initial sessions of five minutes often left me wondering if i forgot to set the timer.

confession time: this week i’ve been an ant. i have pretty good excuses in the form of entertaining coworkers from out of town. but it’s just excuses. i’m a frantic ant. no denying.

my line of acceptable success for any 30DQ is three weeks worth of completion. lets see how things are going:

febreview.jpg
hey what app is that?!

well shit. hitting every day the rest of the way puts me at eighteen. i’m going for it. and i have every intention of continuing into perpetuity. but i will not call this acceptable success until i hit 21 days in any given month. a bit of a reboot today and i’ll be back in the swing in no time.

the quality of my eight sessions are worth discussing. quality is largely influenced by the chosen method (self led, app assisted, group session, etc). the app i use above is one of several suggested around the interwebs called “calm“. it has various scenes to choose from, several soundscapes (nature sounds or instrumental), 7 days of free guided meditation (a must), and subscription-based access to a variety of guided meditation programs that focus on specific needs. as you can see above, it tracks your daily progress, something the other apps i tried all lacked.

free downloadable scenes
free downloadable scenes
my current scene
my current scene
downloadable guides
downloadable guides
personal tracking
personal tracking

another highly recommended app that i tried briefly and has some similar features is headspace. i’ve seen several people my health-centric fb group swear by it, but i find calm much more simplistic and minimal. calm just breathes meditation.

the 8 days i’ve completed include one at three minutes (when i was in a crunch), 3 self-guided five-minute sessions, 2 app-guided five-minute sessions, and 2 app-guided seven-minute sessions. the app-guided sessions are a must for a beginner. teaching methods foundational to long sessions in the future while also debunking the biggest misunderstanding about meditation that says you have to completely clear your mind.

i have seen and felt the positive effects of the practice, albeit minimally considering the habit isn’t even close to fully formed. i suspect as i push forward the hints of mental freshness i’ve experienced will become more and more evident.

i have three days left on the initial 7 days of calm. after which i may fork over the monthly subscription fee for the more advance guides or i may use my past experiences and partake in self-guided sessions of varying lengths. before i get ahead of myself let’s see how the last 10 days of february go.

for now. time to slow down. the world is waiting.

seven days

seven days since full reset. seven days since the first two 30DQs launched.

seven fairly ‘easy’ and straightforward days for quest 1.a.

you’d think breaking a hard caffeine/sugar/dr pepper addiction that’s plagued me for years wouldn’t be classified as easy. and on the whole (considering this is attempt number 373) it hasn’t been. but this is the second time in a year that i’ve quit cold turkey. last time it lasted around 21 days before i gave in because, like a dumbass addict, i thought ‘i’ve broke it, i can swing one or two this weekend.’ addicts do stupid things. one or two over the weekend turned into five or six a day within a week.

and make no mistake, addict is not an understatement. dp was literally (not in the, like, you know, like pre-teen white girl sense) the only drink i would have 90% of my days for the past ten years, save the occasional binge clean-up attempt. but so far it’s been easy.

the main difference now? mindset: i’m not a dp drinker thinking i can go back in moderation at some future date. i’m just a dude that only drinks water and will indulge with a very occasional alcoholic drink. i don’t care if soda in moderation won’t kill me, i’m not going back. even as the fattening but oh so wonderful SuperBowl pizzas are being prepared, i have no desire to throw back a cold one unless that cold one is crisp refreshing water.

oh yes, i’ve had cravings. headaches. grumpiness. and lots of cursing. the liquid demon is fighting to get his teeth back into me. but that bastard can kiss my ass. i’m not going back. and at some point he’ll tuck tail and move on to some other poor schmuck.

quest 1.b hasn’t been as smooth. most of the time i just flat out forgot. the act itself is easy. i’ve done some form of meditation off and on for years, some sessions as long as 48 minutes. but newbies are stupid too. i was setting them for night but by then i didn’t really ‘need’ them in a way that i was self-aware enough to remember. meditation is effective regardless the time and circumstances. but since i was planning them when the craziness of the day has already subsided, it wasn’t really top of mind.

going forward, i’m shooting for mid-day sessions. i’ll recover from the morning hustle and gear up for the stresses of the afternoon. but there’s no way i’ll remember on my own. i’m setting a reminder to remember my mindfulness, and should be in the groove in no time.

onward.

30 Day Quest 1.a and 1.b

my 30 day line of demarcation is the first of each month.  i was hoping to skate by starting in the shortest month of the year, but like the effing genius i am, i chose a leap year to start this damn experiment. the 1 extra day of my planned 2 day cheating is going to suck.

and to start us off, i am tackling two quests at once. there is a completely logical reason behind this as i am a reasonably logical human being: it’d be boring as fuck if my first and only challenge on month 1 is to “drink only water.” let’s face it, it’s a really noble goal, and who’s going to argue that? do i want that sweet nectar of life dr. pepper? damn straight. but does anyone actually care? not at all.  and if it’s boring for me to talk about to my imaginary friends on the internet, it is boring for me to actually tackle.

30 day experiences were born out of boredom to defeat boredom. replacing boredom with boring is about as worthwhile as the points handed out by Drew Carey in the early 2000s.

but DP is my crack. It’s almost the only thing i drink, save the occasional whiskey. so it’s this is a hard quest for a fat bastard like me. challenge two this month gets me through it: undistracted meditation for at least five minutes per day, every day.

i desperately want to start with something awesome like “punch one stranger in a face every day for 30 days”. but the grown up in me realizes i’ve got to get my body right and my mind right. some of the adventures i want to go on (30 days or otherwise) require me to exert some physical activity for longer than 3 minutes at a time (sorry ladies). and some will take guts. the kind of guts that calls for a mind that knows what’s going on around me. these two quests make sense to lay the foundation. they’re both hard, they both require me to make drastic changes in my day to day activity, and they both have proven track records of positive influence.

off we go!

30DQ.1a – replace every drink in my daily intake with water.
30DQ.1b – meditate 5 minutes (minimum) per day

cheers! (with water of course)

here’s to living

sometimes you just have to experiment. life took some weird turns a couple years back and left me in a strange place between who i am and who i could be.

everything changed.

not so much in the day to day details: kids, wife, job. all the same.

but in the intrinsic details. my muses. my values. my philosophy. my weltanschauung.

i found myself. part of me at least. i came to recognize that most of what i projected on this world was for the sake of acceptance. very little was ‘i’ until i learned to let go of everything everyone expected of me. of everything i came to expect of myself simply because i had a warped view of living. in other words, i started unbecoming and as a result, defeated depression.

it has been worth the sacrifice.

i left the social comforts i had known for decades and the results were lonely. i lost friends. some acquaintances who disguised themselves as friends. some painfully close and painfully lost to ill-fated conversations.  and as a result, i found boredom. i found lazyiness. i let apathy become my booze. i forgot how to live. fuck it. time to move on

so here we are. an idea that has been bubbling for a while. no attempts at profundity. just an attempt to kill boredom and apathy. to remember how to live. it is nothing more than the next step in my unbecoming.

30(ish) day experiments, spread across various categories. some with the intention of directly improving my life or health. some designed to stretch my comfort zone. some strictly with the hopes to experience something new.

here’s to living.