Familiar view…daily walk

I’ve been doing a lot of walking as I recover from my bilateral knee replacement. Sometimes it’s extraordinarily lovely…the evening…though the knees are pretty good too.l

A wise owl I’m not.

It’s been a long time since I even thought about this blog. Sure enough, when I tried to bring it back up yesterday, it was broken beyond repair. But not, apparently, beyond restoration. It seems I had a backup staging site. Who knew?

I’ve more or less been broken in the past year or so myself. But again, not beyond restoring, thankfully. Last May I had emergency back surgery followed by months of recovery. And then this January past, it was bilateral knee replacements followed by more months of recovery.

I survived it all and am better for it. I haven’t gotten back to cycling yet, but I’m walking a lot, improving my strength, and have stepped back from a lot of things giving me plenty of time to do all that “recovery work.”

I’ll be riding the Katy Trail later this year with very few and very vaccinated friends. It should be fun. I missed a long ride last year and it is generally an annual ritual. Admittedly, I did get two long rides in the previous year, so perhaps…Nah, couldn’t be.

Anyway, I’ll do my best to report on it was we make our way across Missouri following the Big Muddy.

I just got back from a lovely trip to Alaska where I was hosted by two of my dearest friends. Alaska has been pretty good about managing COVID-19, so I wasn’t too worried about contagion. I’m fully vaccinated, so are my friends, and so were their friends and family. All good.

One of the highlights of the trip was being taken out by a friend to fish for halibut. Score!

I caught my limit of two that day!

That’s me on the left with the larger of my two for the day. Tasty too.

I had some friends in from Idaho and got to spend a good part of the day out at Ka’ena Point. Just in case you didn’t know, that’s the image at the top of this blog. i didn’t bike out there this time…walked.

I’m listening to Brené Brown’s first new podcast Unlocking Us from March 20, 2020.

https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-ffts/

It’s entitled “Brené on FFTs.” That short for f’ing first times. She jokes about this being her first podcast and her first global pandemic. The bottom line of the podcast, besides being an introduction to her, to her podcast, and how it will all work, is that we just need to dive in, realize that this is a first time experience, and so on.

My looking back today is really about my most recent BIG FFT. I’ve mentioned meditation here before, not often, but sometimes, because it’s a big part of my life. I was exposed to it when I was young through my father who practiced TM. Later in my twenties I also trod the TM path for a while. I dropped the practice in my thirties when I basically dropped most anything healthy in my life.

But since my mid-forties, I returned to the practice, moving to what amounts secular Buddhist understanding of meditation. But that’s not the FFT.

No, the FFT is more about how I ended up being a meditation facilitator. I prefer that term to leader, but really it’s not leading, I’m not taking anyone anywhere. I’m also not a teacher in the classic mold as I have not journeyed and spent years learning meditation from teachers at in monastery for years and year. Nope, I’m really far more in the line of the Consciousness Explorers Club:

Being Human Takes Practice

The Consciousness Explorers Club is reinventing the community meditation experience. We explore together every Monday night, share audio of our meditations and our thoughts about practice, and support CEC-inspired local groups around the world.

Now, to be clear, I do sit with a couple of local sanghas and consider the leaders of both to be my teachers and they do have a lineage of teachers…so I suppose I sort of do. But truly, I just want people to meditate with (watch that video).

So what about the FFT, Bob?

Yeah. A year ago, more or less exactly, a team I was on from work was charged with putting together a department event designed to bring us together socially. This is, or was pre-COVID, a regular monthly thing with different teams throughout the year and new teams picked annually as well.

My team decided we’d do a little something on health. As a group we decided to make a nice big healthy salad we could share with everyone. Not a small feat, there were about fifty or more of us in the department at the time. In addition, one of my co-workers was going to offer a 10-minute office yoga practice. I decided I’d try to do a 10-minute mindfulness meditation session.

The salad was excellent.

The yoga was fun.

The meditation was, well…meditation. But oddly enough, several folks asked if I would do it again the following week. As hard as I tried, I could not find a way out of it. So I said I’d check with my teacher and see what he thought.

He, um…asked why I was asking him when it was so clearly the right thing to do. And here I am a year later.

I’ll admit I was terrified. But they were co-workers in my department and I’d been there twenty years, so had many of them. Still…okay, I could do it.

Then one of my co-workers asked if she could bring someone from another department. Then another, then another.

We went on like this for about two months. We’d meet each Tuesday, near lunch time, for a ten minute sitting that I would lead in very basic mindfulness meditation. In truth, it’s not all that complicated because…well…everyone already knows how to breath and it’s really very, very simple. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. It’s just not complicated like teaching someone how to build a house. I can’t do that, but I do breath regularly, so…

Then COVID hit us in March. At the same time our company moved to a more robust video-conferencing system which would support everyone using it all the time. It’s Webex, just so you know. It does what we need, so all good. I’ve gotten very familiar with Webex, Zoom, and a host of others in the last year. I suspect you have too.

Well…then came the next FFT. Why not lead meditation online for our little group. Then, why not do it twice a week. And then finally, “could you record it, Bob? You know, for those folks who can’t make it at the scheduled time.”

And so…

I now have a little group of co-workers that meet twice a week, for just ten minutes, and practice with me. The group varies at each sitting because it is a break time and we are very busy with work. I’m lucky in that my superiors approve so I can pretty take my breaks at the scheduled time and they’ll hold any business meeting I have to attend before or after the time. Thanks!

I also, very early on, started sending a weekly email with resources I found useful. Ten Percent Happier figured early on, still does in fact. A lot of apps made the list. So did a lot of websites and teachers.

Well, it seems the email got passed around. And, as folks do, they invited their friends from the office, and by the end of the year, I found myself with about sixty people signed up. It’s true the group at the sitting is much smaller, and I don’t get usage stats for the recordings, but…wow…all because I worked through the fear and decided it was worth having that FFT experience.

The upshot is, I think doing this may have kept me halfway sane during most of the last year. I’ve come to really enjoy our little group, the mailing list, and, though it sounds a little egotistical, I’m really glad I was able to help bring a little sanity to my workplace this past year.

I’m going to have another little FFT experience, and start posting my Tuesday email here as well. At least, I think I’m going to try. The fact of the matter is, and I do have statistics, no one reads this blog anymore (and even at its height we’re talking maybe a dozen folks). But hey, FFT, don’t let it stop you.

Mahalo!

The Ramones…you just can’t beat this…

Some might argue that The Pogues and Fairytale of New York might be a better Christmas song. But it’s not as punk, that’s for sure.

I’m actually not really happy to be thinking about this. I am actually quite happy to be thinking about this. I’m somewhere between those poles at any given moment.

Retirement is one of those things I never really thought I’d have to think about. I’m old enough to remember duck and cover drills in school. We thought the world would end with a bang. It still might.

Then during my protracted youth, I really never figured I’d last long enough to make to retirement.

And surprise, surprise…here I am. Well, a couple of years out anyway, but close. So I started to do some calculations and I realized something. I could go tomorrow. I won’t. But I could. I’m not saying I’d have a super life of luxury. Frankly, I never have, and don’t really want one.

The other thing I learned is that I’m probably completely wrong about everything I just said about going tomorrow. I really need some good advice. That’s the actual best advice I can give myself. So yeah, time to start actually planning.

My real goal is to retire with enough money to travel regularly should we ever be able to do that again. Seems likely, though changes will have to be made to my lifestyle. Yeah, some changes will definitely have to be made. Darn it.

So…what? Well, it would seem I’m in the boat with most everyone else, but at least the boat will sail.