minimum time ‘till crash

My evening ritual is as bare-bones as I can make it.Some of this is because, at my core, I am a morning person. The shape of my evenings?There’s the two-level go-to-bed alarm — even at my weary end of the day I have a tendency to hyperfocus — that sends me off to the back […]

Gaining wisdom, or wearing down?

How does repetition turn relationships stale and lifeless[…]? What is it about repetitive acts that makes us feel that we are wasting our time? Although it is easy to dismiss our daily routines as trivial, these are not trivial questions, any more than sloth is mere laziness without spiritual consequence. Acedia & Me p186 (boldface […]

Habits I’ve actually acquired

Full disclosure: I am distracting myself from doing the Real Thing I was doing. There’s a word for this particular style of procrastination, but I will triumph over recursive procrastination and not look that up. Right now, anyway. I talk a lot here about my habit-resistant nature, and it’s a true thing, but last week I […]

Strengthiness

(h/t to Mr. Colbert Report) While collecting steps today in the kind of heavy rain I took for granted as a kid in Georgia, I started thinking about shoring up one’s faults vs. leveraging one’s strengths. This, by the way, is all the rage in leadership/management circles: why browbeat someone for sucking at some thing […]

what would you do if you could do nothing?

I gave up on habits. More particularly, on my establishing habits. I concluded that I’m somehow habit-proof. Which seems odd, given that habits and routines are a long-standing part of human existence, but that’s where I arrived. The habit-building advice explosion boomed right after that time. I ignored it. Well, not really; I read web-scraps […]

On Practice, deep or otherwise

So a fair slug of what this blog is for is to figure out how the life I currently live is aligned – or can be aligned – with the best practices for the things I think are important.And since for both writing and prayer DAILY is purportedly critical, I use this space to explore […]

“on the obstacles”

Susan Piver (a Buddhist meditation teacher) used the above title for her email today — it began: Q: Susan, I have trouble committing myself to the cushion… please address this. A: We all have difficulty with this. I totally understand. When you sit on the cushion, you’re agreeing to sit down with the unknown. Sometimes […]