Regular readers know one of my sidchas is meditating, which I’ve done for over a decade and regularly for years. I’ve posted about it lately. I’ve used a few different techniques over the years. Sometimes I use koans. One is Who am I? sometimes What am I? I also often examine consciousness, which is oddly both all of what we experience and slippery to get a hold of. Asking who[…] Keep reading →

It’s easy to track how many burpees I do as part of my twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. I know how many I do per day and I don’t miss days, so I just update the date in my spreadsheet and it tells me. More accurately, the spreadsheet tells me a minimum since now and then I do burpees for other reasons, but I haven’t missed and, so I’ve done more than[…] Keep reading →

The cops have cleaned Washington Square Park somewhat of its heavier drug use and dealing. I’ve talked to a few of the cops and they aren’t all from the local precinct. Some came from elsewhere in the city. I talked to one from the Bronx. It sounds like word got around the city that it was worth it to act on the lawlessness, though I’ve heard there’s plenty extra lawlessness[…] Keep reading →

Different people define middle age differently, but having just turned 51 I think I’m in it by all definitions. Physical My first sense of my body physically declining came in my early thirties, when my potential to compete in ultimate began to decline. Before then, I always felt motivation to practice since I knew the next year my potential would be higher. After then, no matter how much I practiced,[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been avoiding things I devalue lately. After writing about the day after Thanksgiving, also known as Buy Nothing Day, I decided to strive to buy nothing but food that month and succeeded, if you don’t disallow that I bought two things that I later returned. I’ll write more about it when I eventually do buy something, as I’m still going. Next, I decided to avoid social media and news[…] Keep reading →

I just finished my second set today of twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. Normally, I do my second set in the evening, but since I started the habit on December 22, 2011 and today is December 21, 2021, today completes my first decade. I already finished my first decade of publishing blog posts, nearing 5,000. Here are all of them. 20 percent of the time has been on a single load of[…] Keep reading →

Someone suggested I learn about a writer named Pico Iyer. In an interview I listened to he talked about the musician Leonard Cohen, who apparently spent time living as a monk. Cohen’s practice, according to Iyer, included scrubbing the floor. The practice doesn’t sound glamorous. You can hire someone to do it. Why bother if you can afford not to? The movie Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce, showed John Newton[…] Keep reading →