More Things To Contemplate

Okay - it took me a while to make some adjustments to Firefox, in regards to the size of the font it was displaying.  I don't know it well enough yet to easily make adjustments. I have to carefully and slowly weave my way in and out of the various controls - and even then I am not entirely sure what I am doing.

I would categorize it as a typical working Monday - not without it's successes, not without it's challenges and at the end of the day - done.  We get to do it all again tomorrow.  Except not quite the same. In our lives, that sense of repeating the same day over and over is an illusion - each day is different, each day has its own set of nuances.  I made a bit of headway today, so it felt like it was kind of productive.

I got home in the evening, had a burrito for dinner, watched the most recent episode of "Once Upon A Time", then did another hour or two of incidental work virtually, mostly scheduling meetings and running reports.  These are the sort of maintenance related tasks that I would like to do during the day, but that always get pushed aside by the more important stuff, or by the stuff that other people designate as being more important.  Whatever the importance was, at six p.m. I updated my time and called it a night, at least as far as work is concerned.

I then lit a pair of candles and spent ten minutes sitting in my comfortable chair in the living room and just breathing.  It is a wonderful form of meditation and it was very relaxing and it is allowing me to move into this part of the evening with a clearer head.

I've been working on my New Year's resolutions these first two weeks and so far they've been going pretty good.  I think I am doing better in regards to Body and Spirit and now so focused on Mind.  I think it is because what I need to do to work on Mind is find something that I can focus on learning.  Exercise, a better diet, meditation and prayer, those seem, to me, to be easier to attain then thought, then disciplined learning, then a focused approach to developing the mind.  So, tonight, after I finish up with this entry, I am going to try and focus on learning something.

Of course, at this point, I have no idea what I am going to focus on learning, what I am going to focus on doing to expand my mind. It did just dawn on me that I could spend an hour or so reading the most recent issue of the New Yorker.  There ought to be something in there that will catch and hold my attention. For reasons not entirely known to myself, but probably worth exploring, I don't seem to think of reading fiction as being mind expanding, even though it most definitely is. I think that's because I look at reading fiction as a very pleasurable activity and part of me seems to think that expanding the mind doesn't count if its fun.

I could also play a computer game.  They are also one of those things that I don't think of as being particularly mind expanding, but, depending on the game, they certainly have that ability. I seem to think that studying should be a serious thing.  That is probably a through back from other points in my life.

Ah well, more things to contemplate in my meditative times.

A Disciplined Focus on the Basics

It looks like I have, temporarily, fallen on a different rhythm, a more work driven rhythm.  I got home last night and basically went into vegetable mode, due to the hours I’d worked.  I went to sleep early, about 8:00 PM.  As a result of that decision, I woke up about 2:00 AM, spent thirty minutes or so reading, and then managed to go back to sleep until about 5:30 AM.  When I woke at 5:30 AM I was rested and ready to move smoothly into the day.

I had an interesting dreams - it was a work related stress dream, where I was struggling with various aspects of the project that I’m working on.  My biggest worry bead is this: We’re currently “working without a net” on various portions of the project, were working without anyone checking our work, we’re working without an process of peer review and without many of the necessary project controls.  As a result, I have a persistent fear, not so much that I am making a mistake, but that I am missing something entirely - and I simply don’t know I am missing it.  The same holds true of mistakes - I am well aware that I could be making some terrible mistake and simply be totally unaware of it.

That was the anxiety trigger that tossed and turned my dreams last night, but in the dream was the possible solution.  That is one of the things I love about the way the subconscious works, the way it is continually seeking an answer, and then when it finds something it thinks will work present it to use in the form of images.

In the dream I was preparing to go on a raid of some sort.  It was somewhere in the dark hours of the night, I was in a room lit by a lantern, and I had all my equipment laid out on the floor, meticulously counting each piece, ordering everything, making sure all of the basics were accounted for prior to the raid.  I woke up with the realization that was the approach I needed - a simple and disciplined focus on the basics.