I exercise on a five-day rotation between lifting, resting, and cardio so months with 31 days give me an extra rest day to experiment. This time I decided to try to recapture my nearly five-year-old achievement of 5,000 meters in 20 minutes on the rowing machine, which means averaging 2:00/500m for 20 minutes. A well-trained man in his 20s or 30s could do it easily. A serious competitor might not[…] Keep reading →

Talking to a friend about meditating, after I said something, he made me repeat it so he could write it down. He told me to post it. Here it is: If you get interrupted every nine minutes, you can’t come up with an idea complex enough to require ten minutes uninterrupted thinking. In other words: If you get interrupted every nine minutes, you’ll never come up with an idea that[…] Keep reading →

About ten months in to meditating 20 minutes two days out of my five-day exercise cycle, a few updates. I last updated in November on my full lotus pose. Practice is making it more comfortable. Here’s my post with the video of me in the pose. You may have noticed my sitting on a folded towel on a folded sheet. Here’s me, about to sit on the folded towel on[…] Keep reading →

Maybe from the podcasting, maybe from writing, maybe from my general interest in self-awareness and preferring to do things deliberately, not thoughtlessly. We all know about filler words and sounds like “umm,” “like,” “so,” and “and.” I’m not sure why we use them. Lately I’ve started trying to reduce them, which takes concentration, so therefore distracts from speaking and listening. I’ve been asking myself lately why we end sentence with[…] Keep reading →

I’ve read a lot of books on nature. Most focus on facts, figures, and information that don’t help. To the extent they provoke emotion, they do so heavyhandedly, lacking genuineness or authenticity. If you’re explaining, you’re losing, as a former U. S. President said, and most books on nature explain. I just finished a book, Over, which you can review online in its entirety for free. It’s mostly a book[…] Keep reading →

You’ve heard the concept that poor people today, with cell phones, large TVs, computers, and so on live beyond the fantasies of kings. Here are a few headlines among many articles. Today’s Poor Live Like Kings Compared to the Poor Just 100 Years Ago We live like kings (opening sentence: “It suddenly occurred to me yesterday morning as I was getting dressed, listening to the radio, that we today live[…] Keep reading →

I see more people in my neighborhood, especially my neighborhood park—Washington Square Park—addicted to I don’t know what. My whole life, I’ve never been far from seeing addiction. I don’t think I’ve known anyone uncontrollably addicted. Lately, in my daily picking up litter from the northwest corner of Washington Square Park, regulars there have started conversations with me. Our longest conversation lasted about thirty to forty-five minutes. One guy made[…] Keep reading →