Life

According to my mom, I have her father to thank for a trait of mine: I worry. A lot. Except, truth be told, while I would’ve loved to have met him and spent time with him (he was dead long before I was “even a twinkle in my mom’s eye”, as the saying goes), I wouldn’t have thanked him for it. In fact, I might have thrown something at him. Nothing hard or overly dangerous, mind you, just enough to convey the message of “but gramps, that trait sucks, I don’t want that!”

I’ve been going through a recent bout with hardcore worrying over my health. I’ve had a few problems pop up recently, some stomach pain and an ugly mole^[1], and so, logically, I’ve been worrying that I have some sort of cancer and that I’m going to die within a week. Which is clearly illogical, even total nonsense, and I know it. There’s an awful lot of things that can cause stomach pain, and an ugly mole can just be an ugly mole, rather than melanoma. Yeah, I tend to imagine I have the worst possible thing whenever I have health problems…

Knowing these things hasn’t helped in silencing my mind, though. My brain just keeps going through the same thought patterns over and over, and I’ve not had much luck in shutting the lump of grey matter up. The list just keeps looping - what if I’ve got a terrible illness, what if I’m going to die soon, what will my family do when I do, etc. When it reaches the end of the list, it just starts over.

It’s become rather tiresome, actually.

And of course, the real kicker is, even if what’s up with my mortal coil is serious - well, what’s worrying going to help? No one ever got better by worrying. In fact, if I don’t have some form of cancer or other terrible disease, sitting around worrying constantly will certainly push me towards having one. It’s goofy, really. And like I said, I know it’s goofy. I just don’t know how to stop it. When I’ve caught myself running the “Let’s Worry About What Might Be Wrong With You!” reruns in my head, I’ve tried to stop it by focusing on other things, but it hasn’t worked very well. It just leads to a tension in my head, a tug-of-war between the part of my mind that says “forget about it” and the part of my mind that screams “no, we must worry about it, now!”

I’ve also tried my standby, being mindful of the worry: looking at it in a detached matter, seeing how it manifests itself in my body (tense chest, slightly creased forehead, prominent frown), and seeing where it goes. It either gets better, gets worse, or stays the same^[2]. It gets better more often than it gets worse, but being mindful all the time is harder than it sounds, so I’ve still spent a lot of time in the past few weeks in worry mode.

I’ve been this way, a worry-wart, for as long as I can remember, but it’s reached new heights now that I’ve had to visit a doctor multiple times. Up until now, I’ve never had any health problems at all. No hospitalizations, no broken bones, nothing. Alas, health problems happen, and after seeing my internal responses to this crop of them, I’ve gotta’ say: I don’t want to keep doing this worrying nonsense. It’s no fun for me, and more importantly, it’s no fun for the people around me, because when I’m in Worry Mode (TM), I’m grumpy.

I’m not really sure what I’m going to do about the problem at this point. My family tells me “Just relax, stop worrying, you’re going to worry your life away” - okay, but how? Brute mental force directed at the worrying thoughts doesn’t work, at least not very well, nor does thinking about the issues logically. Where’s the little switch in my head labeled Worry, and how do I turn it off?

Maybe I’ve got a bit of OCD going on; maybe it should be brought up at the next doctor’s appointment. What say you lot?

1. Removed today, actually, and so now I just have to wait to see what the lab’s verdict is; the dermatologist seemed pretty confident it wasn’t anything to worry about. [↩]
2. This is something that Gil Fronsdal has pointed out in many of his talks, which I listen to via Zencast. It’s comical the way it sounds, but it’s true. Pain and emotions will always do one of these three things when you observe them mindfully. [↩]

I’ve been reflecting on a trait I have, or perhaps one would say problem, and how I might get rid of it. What’s the problem? I have a hell of a time sticking to some things, despite how badly I’d like to be successful. I’ll think of something I want to do, or something I think I should do, and decide: alright, I’m going to do this. The motive is there, the intention is there, the will is there. The will ultimately disappears, however, and I’m not quite sure where the little bugger is getting off to.

I posted a little under a year ago about being in a Buddhist meditation group. The group has since had some problems in getting together, mostly due to scheduling conflicts between us. It’s amazing how difficult it can be to get 3-4 people together in one place for an hour… but I digress. What of my own daily meditation, which I had been doing at the time? Good question. I’m not sure what happened. My zafu and zabuton are still set up in my room, but I’ve sat down there once in months (a few days ago). Why? I just can’t bring myself to do it every day. I still want to, and I have the time, but when it comes around to doing it, something in my head just says “meh”, and I go do something else. And then the next day rolls around, I think “I should meditate”, and yet I don’t.

The same thing happened with my attempt at a health reboot. I had started keeping tabs on what I was eating, and I was exercising daily. And then I slipped, and then slipped again, and then I just fell back into the habits I’d had before: not exercising, eating generally like crap, and feeling bad about it the whole time. I’ve recently tried to get back into exercising, but it’s been a rather halting start. I’ve had more off days than on days, and unless that flips around, I’ll probably quit altogether. It was easy for me to start, as I found a form of exercise that I genuinely enjoy: kickboxing. I got into it, even going so far as to buy a punching bag (and to go to the considerable bother of hanging the thing, which was more difficult than I had anticipated.) But starting and staying the course are proving, of course, to be two different things. I’ve had the bag for around three weeks now, and it’s been used on 4 or 5 times. That’s not going to cut it.

So what’s the deal?

That’s the million dollar question, right? Well, here’s the problem: apparently, I’m human. Really. I did some googling on changing habits, and found that what I’m struggling with is pretty common. “Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with, bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with” is a quote from Brian Tracey, a motivational speaker, and is perhaps the shortest and clearest summation of what I’m struggling with. The cliché “humans are creatures of habit” is a cliché for a reason, after all. We get stuck in our ways and often, it takes more than just brute willpower to change them.

Leo at Zen Habits (love the blog name) has a good post on things to avoid when changing habits, which of course is full of things I’ve been doing when attempting these changes. And I do mean full - I think I’m guilty of every single thing on his list. Probably the biggest thing I’m guilty of is not maintaining accountability. I posted here in the past about exercising, about meditation, and then said nothing more of it. In “real life” (whatever the frak that means anymore, right?), I was also pretty quiet about my intentions to change myself. Certainly, my wife knew, my mom knew, but I hadn’t really talked to them in depth about my goals. It was more like, out of the blue, I said “oh, by the way, I’m going to exercise / meditate / whatever every day, poke me if you notice I’m not doing so, mmkay?” I’m sure they responded in the positive, and then soon after forgot about me ever having said anything

But, that’s not really their problem. It’s not their responsibility, or anyone else’s for that matter, to make me accountable. I have to do that. I’m not really sure how I’m going to do that for my exercising and meditation, though. I could certainly post about it here, but every day? Doubtful on that. Twitter? Maybe, but there’s an awful lot of noise on Twitter, so I’m not really sure anyone would notice if I didn’t post a tweet of “exercised for the day” or whatever. Leo made a training blog to help keep him accountable, but I’m not really sure if I want to go that route; I’ve already got two blogs, and if I make a blog for every habit I wish to make or change… well, I don’t have that much time to blog! Perhaps I’ll just talk to the family again, in more depth, and ask them to make me give a report each day. Or I could put up a calendar somewhere (the fridge would be wonderfully clichéd but practical), and mark the days I did whatever it is I’m wanting to be doing. I’ll think on it some more.

But, like I said, I’m guilty of more than just not keeping myself accountable for my goals. After reading Leo’s post, I realize that I’ve been failing pretty much everytime because when I’ve tried to change my habits, it’s been a rather spur of the moment “hey, I’m gonna’ do this!” sort of thing, with little no planning. I never wrote down any plan, especially nothing specific; I didn’t think about obstacles, I was just going to do it, by the gods! And we see how well that goes. No meditation in more or less months, and my newfound kickboxing routine quickly disappearing into that pile of vague memories which start with “Hey, I remember when I tried doing that…”

So, the gameplan: keep Leo’s list of “things to avoid” in mind, while I figure out how I’m going to go about making a 30 minute meditation session and a 30-45 minute exercise session part of my daily routine. But as per his advice, one of those is going on the shelf for a bit; you’re not supposed to tackle two habits at once More on this after I’ve thought about it some more and done a bit more research. And if you’ve not seen anything on this blog within a few weeks about this, call me on it. All of ya’.

A couple days ago, I was reading feeds in Google Reader, and found Wubi through MetaFilter. Wubi is an application that lets you install Ubuntu through Windows, just like any other application. You download it, you double click the exe file, and Wubi basically does the rest. When it’s done, you reboot your computer and are presented with a boot menu, allowing you to boot into Windows or Ubuntu. Pretty cool, huh? I thought so.

But Wubi isn’t the point here.

After reading the MetaFilter post, I clicked over to the Wubi site and downloaded the installer. I started the installation process (which takes quite a while, due to it having to download an Ubuntu ISO), and left my computer for a few hours. When I came back, I rebooted and selected Ubuntu. It didn’t work. It hung at a line saying something about finding menu.lst. I rebooted, selected Windows, and immediately got to digging in the Wubi support forum, trying to solve the problem. I’d spent half hour, maybe 45 minutes, doing this before I paused and thought…

Wait a second - why am I doing this?

You see, I’ve installed Ubuntu in the past. The “correct” way, the standard way, by making a couple of new partitions, then booting from an Ubuntu install CD. It’s not that hard at all. I ended up removing Ubuntu because while it worked quite well, I still found myself in Windows XP more often than not - old habits die hard. So why in the world was I spending time trying to figure out how to install Ubuntu with Wubi?

Umm… I guess I just got caught up with the flow of “wow, this is a neat idea!” and kept going with it. I never stopped to think, why am I following through with this? Why am I going beyond just reading the post, nodding, and saying “Hey, that’s pretty neat”?

It’s easy to get dragged down into the current, of just running with whatever your brain thinks is appealing. The problem with that, of course, is that our brains have a massive (I’m talking enormous) case of ADD, and if we grab on to everything it labels as appealing, we’re never going to really be in control.

Try to break the cycle. If you catch yourself jumping into something new (or old) without really thinking about it, ask yourself why you’re doing it. It’s entirely up to you as to whether your response validates your actions or leads you to stopping - but just make sure you have a response. It sucks to burn up a an hour or two of time, and only then think, “What in the world did I do that for?”

Dear Kroger,

You recently expanded your store in my area a great deal. You added a Starbucks, a Donatos, a sushi bar, and countless new aisles. For you, this is, I suppose, a good thing. More space, more products, (hopefully) more sales. I’m happy for you.

However, was it really necessary to change the location of so many items? Certainly, with the expansion of the store, things couldn’t be in the exact same place. I get that things had to be moved a bit to deal with the new additions.

But do so many things really need to be moved across the frakking store? Not only have some things been moved to a totally new location, miles away from their original spot, some items that I buy normally weren’t to be found at all. Whether they’re hiding somewhere that I missed, or they disappeared in the move, I don’t know.

Please provide an updated floor plan, set out at the doors, for your customers. We’d really appreciate it. When someone is craving banana-flavored chips, it’s quite frustrating to be not be able to find them.

Thanks.

I heard a story about one of my neighbours last night, and I simply have to share it.

The neighbour in question is a major alcoholic. He lives across the street from us, 5 or 6 houses down. In this house also lives his two brothers, who are also alcoholics. They drink basically around the clock, and they often end up in the middle of the street screaming and yelling at each other (probably about who got the last beer).

On with the story. Apparently, he gave a woman (possibly a prostitute, I’m not sure) $40 and asked her to go get him some crack. As to be expected, she never returned, with the money nor the crack. So, the first thing Billy did was raise 9 kinds of hell. There was much stomping up and down the street, waving his arms, etc. And then he did something even more idiotic: he called the police and told them what had happened. Yes. He called the police, told them he’d given some lady $40 to buy him some crack, and that she never came back with the money or his drugs.

Suffice to say, Billy is spending New Year’s Eve in jail.