Auxiliary Memory

Simplifying an Overloaded Life

I found a web site today that inspires me, Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. Babauta claims to have found a key to successful living by making one small change at a time, and over time these small changes have led to major changes in his life. Since he is succeeding at things I have longed to attain, his web site made me sit up and take notice.

I have been trying to make dozens of changes in my life for years, and although I succeed in small ways, it’s always with one step forward and two steps back inefficiency. Babauta’s breakthrough insight is to pick one goal, focus on it exclusively, and stick to it until it becomes a habit before attempting any other changes. He even created The Sea Change Program that focused on 12 monthly goals, many of which matched mine. Unfortunately, his study group seems to have been designed for 2013, so I’m 12 months late. His goals were: stop procrastinating, eat healthier, meditate, exercise, write daily, simplify your day, get organized, declutter, be grateful, reduce/eliminate debt, read more and let go – are almost a perfect fit to my goals, if I had the sense to organize my thoughts, which is why they resonate so strongly.

Procrastination

My life has been one long act of procrastination. I have so many things that I try to do, that I want to do, that I feel required to do, that I do very little at all. Also my sense of decisiveness makes Hamlet look like General Douglas MacArthur. Babauta’s idea of picking one goal and sticking to it exclusively until it’s attain scares me on many levels. First, I have to pick the one and only goal, two I have to ignore all the others, and three I have to act. That requires both decisiveness and commitment, two traits that aren’t in my genetic makeup.

Health

Interestingly, Babauta’s second goal is to eat healthier. Because my arteries got clogged enough to require getting a heart stent this year, plus discovering that I’m gluten intolerant, and finally having my GP and cardiologist both freak out over my cholesterol just weeks apart causes outside forces to make a decisive decision for me – eat healthier. So my goal for December 2013 is to studying my diet and health books and solve once and for all what my eating habits should be. I have books by five different doctors each claiming their diet will restore my health – unfortunately they don’t completely agree. Strangely enough, they do agree on enough to make certain eating decisions obvious – eat more vegetables and fruits, and stop eating junk food, that I can commit to the basics right away.

My goal for December will be to study all my health and diet books, decide what is good to eat, to stop eating what is bad, to develop a repertoire of meals to regularly cook, research menus at local restaurants that will support my healthy diet, study how to buy and store fresh healthy produce, learn techniques to cook all the meals I need to eat, and then stick to my diet so I can give away all my health and diet books and stop thinking about food.

Discovering that I’m gluten intolerant has been interesting. I’ve had stomach problems for years which I’ve attributed to many causes, but now that I’ve gone several weeks without Pepcid and Tums, and my stomach is quiet, the chest pains have faded away, the pains in my knee have disappeared, and my hip pain has been reduced so much that on some days I don’t even notice it, I’ve come to believe that what I eat does affect my health. Now I just need to learn what to eat or not eat to reduce the clogging in my arteries. My cardiologist doesn’t seem to believe that diet can reverse plague in arteries, but I have books by other doctors who claim it can. I need to follow what they say to test their theory.

Meditate

Mediating has always been a mystery to me, but I keep coming across people who claim it works. It shall be a future goal. I wonder why Babauta ranks it third though. Obviously he considers it very important.

Exercise

I already routinely do physical therapy exercises for my spinal stenosis related back problems. My next goal is to commit to additional daily exercises that are more aerobic, strength and stamina building. I don’t see why I can’t combine this with my December health goal, but I’ll follow Babauta’s advice and make it a separate goal for January.

Write Daily

I already write daily, but it’s blogging. My ultimate goal once I get my health related goals accomplished is to write fiction daily.

Simplify

Now this goal is one I ache to achieve. Years ago when I got my debt under control it was by focusing on paying off one debt at a time until I had only one credit card which I charged everything and paid off each month. This mirrors Babauta’s ideas about goals. I haven’t worried about paying bills since. My daily life is so full of distractions that I feel like I have a thousand bill collectors after me. The major cause of this is I want to do too many things. I need to simplify my goals and ambitions. I’d like to get up in the morning and only think about writing my novel.

Organize

Three of Babauta’s goals simplify, organize and declutter seem to be closely related. Maybe as I work on them their individual distinctiveness will emerge.

Declutter

I’m constantly trying to declutter. I’ve been doing this my whole life. But fighting the battle of endless crap accumulation is an endless war. I would think decluttering would come before simplify and organize. I could write a million words about mental and physical clutter. I don’t know how I’m ever going to accomplish this goal. For example, I have over 1,000 books, audiobooks and ebooks that I own hoping to read. I have a book shopping habit where I buy more books to read in one year than I could read in ten. And I figure there’s easily 10,000 books I would love to read. I think I already own more unread books than I have time to read for the rest of my life. Reading is my life – so how could I possibly declutter all the books in my life? How do I organize my reading when I want to master all the major literature of history. When you add music, movies and television shows, you can imagine how cluttered my mind is when it comes my pop culture addiction.

Gratefulness

I’ve always been grateful my whole life. One of my core hopes is that I have a moment before I die where I can contemplate how grateful I am for this chance to exist before I cease to exist. This is one goal I have down. All the time I spend with my friends and family, all books I read, the songs I hear, the shows I watch on television, all remind me how grateful I am to be here.

Eliminate Debt

I’ve already conquered this goal too except for my mortgage. Now that I’ve retired I’ve got to learn to spend less, and on that too.

Read More

Another goal I don’t have to worry about. I should probably study how to read less, but I won’t. My life is reading. With audio books, ebooks, tablet computers, the world wide web, I’ve become more and more efficient at reading.

Letting Go

Now this one is complex. I’m not sure what Babauta plans to say, but I went through a Buddhist phase in my early twenties and it has stuck to me my whole life. Mentally, I’ve let go of so much over the decades that even though my mind is starting to fail, I like my headspace so much now that I never wish to be younger. Oh sure, I’d love a younger, healthier body, but I would never trade if it meant I had to go back to a younger mental self. I’m like a Hindu who has done a lot of work to get off the wheel of life and death, and I wouldn’t want to undo all that effort. That’s how I define letting go. But I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe we get multiple lifetimes to work on letting go. We have to do it all in this lifetime.

But what are we letting go of? Now that’s the interesting part. If you’re Buddhist or Hindu, then it’s desire. If you are Zen Buddhist its illusions. But if you’re a westerner with heavy Christian heritage, it’s sin. If you’re an atheist, it’s all three and more. It’s a complete deprogramming of the past, and the twelve goals Babauta has selected is great start.

JWH – 12/2/13

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

A very long time ago, Judy Collins sang a song called “Who Knows Where The Times Goes?” that is very relevant to me now. Play this video to hear the song, and to have a soundtrack for this essay. Play the other two if you have the time, and especially if you don’t, and you’ll know which by the end of this story.

I’ve been retired five weeks now, and I’m constantly asking myself, where does the time go? For my entire work life I dreamed of having more time by not having to work, and now that I don’t have to work, I’m not finding that abundance of time for which I wished so hard. What’s happened? I should have a third more time – where did it go?

Before I retired I read about a book a week. I thought after retiring I’d have so much more time that I might get to read two books a week. I’m not even reading as much as when I worked full time. Does anyone really knows where their time goes?

I’m not watching more TV, or even doing more housework. I’m certainly not writing more. Days have gone into hyperdrive, and time has just disappeared – going who knows where. I no longer think about tomorrow, and everyday is Saturday, and it’s very pleasant indeed, but I keep asking myself, who knows where the time goes?

Was time ever a commodity?

Just because we can count the hours and minutes doesn’t mean we have them to spend and save.

“Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” is a folk song written by Sandy Denny in 1967, and here’s a tribute to her, which ends with a photo of her headstone. She didn’t live long, and her grave marker is a very sad way we all ask where does the time go?

I’m watching a television series called Lark Rise to Candleford about life in England in the 1880s. In one episode a craftsman comes to Candleford to build the town a clock and he warns the folk their old life will disappear when they live by the clock. After retiring I’m living in a different dimension, without a clock, where time is disappearing. I’m already forgetting the days of the weeks, and it’s hard to remember the days of the month, and now, even the hours of the day seem unimportant.

Time is something we have when we live by the clock. I no longer look at the time to see that I have three more hours till lunch, or two more hours until I need to do something else. It only intrudes when the outside world asks me to do something at a specific time. I get up when I feel like it, I eat when I’m hungry. I watch television when I want, from streaming or DVD, not a schedule. I read when the urge strikes, and nap when I’m drowsy. Sometimes it’s light outside, sometimes it’s not, and that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Yesterday I turned 62. If I stopped following the calendar I wouldn’t even feel the time of getting older. Maybe it doesn’t even matter where the time goes. Can time be an illusion? Maybe time only exists if we count minutes, and it ceases to exist when we don’t. What if I was brave enough to throw away my clocks, watch and calendars? Would time disappear completely? Would living become timeless?

I really love this song. Here’s another version, a more recent version. Does it matter that there’s been 43 years since the first version? It doesn’t feel like it, not if you’ve stopped counting the minutes.

I know how to find the time again – if I wanted to. All I have to do is live by the clock. If I want my 8:30 am to 5:00 pm hours again all I have to do is live by numbers. Require myself start writing at 8:30, and take lunch at 12, and to read between 1 and 3, and work at hobbies between 3 and 5, and I’ll find my lost time. I don’t know if I will though. Living without time is a different state of mind, and I’m digging my new kind of consciousness. I just hope it’s not the land of the Lotus eaters.

JWH 11/26/13

I Had a Dream–But Was it Mine?

Are dreams a form of communication from our subconscious? That sounds much too mystical for an atheist like myself. Last night I awoke from a dream with a strong sense of message. Essentially my dream was telling me that the important things we do in life are those we do with other people. That two or more heads are better than one. I can barely remember the dream now, but I know I was trying to do something in the dream, accomplish some goal, but it might have been as trivial as playing a game, and a woman told me we can only get ahead by working together. That struck me as profound – at least in the context of the dream. I have a vague memory in the dream that everyone was competing against each other and getting nowhere. But I have no idea at what.

Now I’m not going to start a religion of cooperation, but instead I’m going to ask: who is the author of my dreams. Quite often I wake up and feel like I’ve been jerked out of a complexly plotted story. I don’t feel “I” was writing the story. I haven’t read Freud or Jung, but I get the feeling that my subconscious is more thoughtful than I’ve ever given it credit for before. Now I don’t feel possessed, or think I have multiple personalities, but I feel there’s an unconscious thinking machine in my head processing data while I’m not paying attention. In recent years, I feel it’s doing far more than processing random data, but is the novelist of my dreams, making sense of a random series of scenes?

Reality doesn’t come with a story. It happens. If a dog chases a chipmunk it’s not a scene in a story, it’s just another event in reality. Humans want to make everything into a story. The reason why there are so many JFK conspiracy theories is because people can’t just accept that Lee Harvey Oswald just happen to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right experience, to kill the president. They want more, they want it to fit a story.

I need to read up on recent research into the subconscious. I’m wondering if decades of reading and thinking about writing hasn’t affected my subconscious. I can’t help but believe that it’s getting better at plotting. In recent decades I feel my dreams are shaped more like stories, with good plotting.

But was my dreaming subconscious sending the conscious me a message last night? It’s obvious that cooperation produces more success than lone wolf endeavors. I wonder if my dream is commenting on my retired life, where I spend a lot of time alone. I don’t know. It could be my story telling mechanism is reading the dream that way. It could be I was only competing in some kind of game in the dream and the woman was trying to convince me to work together to win.

JWH – 11/22/13

The Addiction to Fiction

Have you ever wondered about the nature of fiction?

Reality is what we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, feel with our hands, taste with our mouth and smell with our nose. Fiction is the way we fool our senses into thinking we’re perceiving another reality, one that isn’t there, but one we want to temporarily inhabit. Fiction is our effort to create virtual realities without computers, using just the power of our minds, or the illusion of television/movie screens.

From amoebas to chimpanzees, we’re probably the only creature on Earth that spend so much time rejecting reality. Why? Have we evolve more brain power than we need to live, so we use the excess to imagine? Or is sitting around in trees eating grubs just not enough to keep our brains busy? We created civilization after civilization trying to find the right alternative to nature, but we’re never happy. We always want more.

Or did our addiction to fiction start with “Once upon a time” when were were so very little?

I have met people who lived their lives without fiction, but they were usually graduate students from Asian countries whose ambitions didn’t allow for them to waste time on books, movies, television, comics and video games. Busy people, especially those who go on to make billions, usually don’t waste time with fiction. Which makes me wonder if I hadn’t had my lifelong addiction to fiction if I would have been busier, more creative and productive? Or is it, if we don’t find exciting lives to live, we read about them instead?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not regretting my addiction. I am not trying to talk myself into going cold turkey. I am too far gone to ever contemplate giving up my addiction.

I want to understand the nature of fiction so I can seek more powerful fictional highs.

Most bookworms are beer drinkers and marijuana tokers, merely satisfied with using one genre their entire life. I’m not sure any mystery or science fiction novel ever gets beyond the buzz of beer or the high of grass – for the real opium and heroin level highs you have to move on to literary writers. And that’s so hilarious, because the most addictive fiction, the hardest of the hard stuff, are those books that get the closest to writing about reality.

Television and movies are more like crack highs that become all consuming. Which makes video games the crystal meth of fiction.

I like to rationalize that fiction represents the greatest form of communication. In real life we can listen to each other chatter on for minutes at a time at most, but when we read a book, some of those communiqués last for thirty or forty hours. How many people would listen to their friends if they talked as long as Tolstoy, Proust or even Stephen King? And is Anna Karenina or War and Peace escapism, or capsule summaries of 19th century life?

JWH – 11/18/13

The Flavors of Science Fiction

Science fiction is not a good term for pointing to the things I like about science fiction books. I know too many people who claim to love science fiction, but we don’t share the same favorite movies and books. Why is that? Well, because the term science fiction is not a very good term for pointing at a specific type of stories. It’s a collective term for a whole spectrum of fantastic tales. I’m now thinking we need a new way of describing the stories we love that go beyond genre labels.

I’m not even sure the standard genres labels, mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, westerns, historical, thriller, etc. are all that useful for readers. They’re a rough categorization for book publishers and bookstores, but not very precise for reading moods. I think readers like particular flavors featured in fiction, rather than their genre classification.

Take witty romantic comedies. Does it really matter where the witty romance takes place, in the old west, in Regency England, in outer space, as part of a murder mystery in 1939 New York City, if that’s the kind of story you’re in the mood to read? If you’re in the mood to shoot a lot of bad guys, does it matter if it’s Al Qaeda terrorists you blow away, or aliens from Betelgeuse or Nazis in WWII?

I believe readers who love Military SF would probably enjoy just as much, high-tech, squad level combat stories set in other times and places. Combat stories with band of brothers camaraderie is the flavor readers crave. Or a grunt working up the ranks is another flavor people love. Honor Harrington stories are appealing in the same way many people love stories about Horatio Hornblower or Aubrey-Maturin stories. I think they reflect a flavor of fiction rather than a genre. Although some readers might find they love stories about very tall women, and thus the connection to other sea stories wouldn’t matter.

Growing up I loved “sense of wonder” stories. I thought the label meant specific kinds of science fiction, but I don’t now. Now I know there are several buttons to push to turn on my sense of wonder. When I was a kid and read books like After Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, it pushed my sense of wonder button in a big way. When the humans were exploring the ancient city of Bronson Beta, that pegged my sense of wonder meter. Any science fiction book that has explorers walking around in long dead civilizations pushes my sense of wonder button. But when I read regular fiction and nonfiction books about explorers poking around in long dead human civilizations of Earth, it pushes the same button.

Another type of story that sets off my sense of wonder button are those that remember humans after they became extinct, like the connecting pieces to City by Clifford Simak, or the later chapters of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. But watching documentaries about life after people sets off the same flavor. Theoretically I should be able to seek out all the stories, whether science fiction, or nonfiction, and find the flavor I desire to experience. The same powerful sense of wonder flavor came in the 1920 poem “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The World Without Us is evoked by a very specific idea. It shows up every now and then in science fiction, but elsewhere too.

Another flavor I realized I loved as a kid that I completely associated with Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels, is the young adult science fiction novel. I found the same flavor in many Winston Science Fiction novels and books by Andre Norton. But over the years I realized that any story about a teen without parents struggling to make it in a new environment does the trick. Part of the enticing flavor is the kid must be on their own, or their parents must be mostly tuned out. National Velvet by Enid Bagnold works because Velvet Brown is learning to do something behind her parent’s back, and something girls, especially young girls in the 1920s, didn’t do, which was jockey a horse in a national race.

What I point to when I use the term science fiction, are those books which extrapolate on current trends to speculate about possible futures. Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stand on Zanzibar, and The Windup Girl are examples of what I mean. But there are many kinds of science fiction that I read that don’t fit that flavor. Space opera is one. PKD type stories are another. In fact, Philip K. Dick wrote a flavor of story I really crave that’s not science fiction at all, and those where his stories about the 1950s. I really love Confessions of a Crap Artist, and would read more like it if I could find them.

I often meet people who love Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga series. That’s the flavor they think of when they crave science fiction, but most science fiction stories are not like her books about Miles and Cordelia. Her books are a mixture of romance, military, thriller and mystery set in an aristocratic galactic empire. Her books have so many other flavors that I don’t think of them as science fiction at all, at least by my definition. But that’s my point. Fans of Bujold seek a certain flavor or flavors in their fiction that can’t be described by the generic term science fiction. I find her books very pleasant, but none of their flavors actually make me think of science fiction.

To me, when a group of people all claim to love science fiction, I no longer think they love the same thing, even though they are all using the same phrase, science fiction. In reality, they could all hate each other’s favorite books and movies. We have to accept the term science fiction because it’s so widely used, but I think impossible to universally define. Now when I talk to friends about books, or read reviews, I’m going to see if I can find out the flavors of the stories, because I know I love certain flavors of fiction and crave them.

JWH – 11/15/13