Optimizing...................

 We are optimizing for all the wrong things: Busyness.  Nonstop information.  Digital relevance.  It is easy to convince ourselves that we are getting so much done when in fact we are hardly getting anything done, at least not of real value. . . . If the goal is to optimize, we shouldn't be focused on doing more for the sake of doing more.  Rather, we should be focused on being fully present for the pursuits and people that matter most to us.

-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

Be there................

 So that was why I was in the city that day. Not to just teach my class or network or catch up with clients. Not to get a free dinner or a lead on another deal down the road.

Just to be there. To connect with someone. To share the least marketable part of me - my silly sense of puns - and to make someone laugh a little. To break tension and restore some hope.

-Matthew Ferrara, the rest of the story here

transcendence.................

     In surfing and in life, it's true that one can't have a "too willful will," as the Zen master says.  One won't be very well attuned to things beyond oneself without paying careful attention to them, and it is difficult to pay close attention to other things if one is preoccupied with oneself.  Perhaps one need only withdraw certain "attachments" consistent with one's aim of hitting the target, such as an attachment to performing well, or to winning, or to pleasing one's parents or oneself.  But Zen seems to require more, and indeed nothing less than "withdrawing from all attachments whatsoever, by becoming utterly egoless: so that the soul, sunk within itself, stands in the plentitude of its namely origin."
     Surfing simply can't be so exactingly ego-free.  No aquatic movement is so fixed to permit falling into a fully passive state;  there's no time for not actively adapting.  If you had to find a trance state or wakeful dream sleep, and the wave's next movement was coming quickly, you'd eat it, or quickly become out of sync.  The bodily dynamism and moment by moment demands on one's attention naturally draw one's consciousness out into the waves, away from oneself.  But this ego transcendence serves the surfer's active purposes, of being adaptively attuned.  If that isn't Zen, it's a blessedly easy way of being while doing.

-Aaron James: Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Garbage time....................

Jerry Seinfeld on Father's Day and parenting:

I don’t need any special days. I mean they’re all special. We spend a lot of time together and I enjoy every second of it. Again, I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about “quality time” – I always find that a little sad when they say, “We have quality time.” I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

Sick at heart...........................

     It was a routine speech we got during our first day of basic training, delivered by a wiry little lieutenant:  "Men, up to now you've been good, clean, American boys with an American's love for sportsmanship and fair play.  We're here to change that.  Our job is to make you the meanest, dirtiest bunch of scrappers in the history of the World.  From now on you can forget the Marquess of Queensberry Rules and every other set of rules.  Anything and everything goes.  Never hit a man above the belt when you can kick him below it.  Make the bastard scream.  Kill him any way you can.  Kill, kill, kill, do you understand?"

      His talk was greeted with nervous laughter and general agreement that he was right.  "Didn't Hitler and Tojo say the Americans were a bunch of softies?  Ha!  They'll find out."  And of course, Germany and Japan did find out:  a toughened up democracy poured forth a scalding fury that could not be stopped.  It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high that most of our feverish fighters had not idea why they were fighting - other than the enemy was a bunch of bastards.  A new kind of war, with all destruction, all killing approved.  Germans would ask, "Why are you Americans fighting us?"  "I don't know, but we're sure beating the hell out of you," was the stock reply.

      A lot of people relished the idea of total war:  it had a modern ring to it, in keeping with our spectacular technology.   To them it was like a football game:  "Give 'em the axe, the axe, the axe..."  Three small-town merchants' wives, middle-aged and plump, gave me a ride when I was hitchhiking home from Camp Atterbury.   "Did you kill a lot of them Germans?" asked the driver, making cheerful small talk.  I told her I didn't know.  This was taken for modesty.  As I was getting out of the car, one of the ladies patted me on the shoulder in a motherly fashion:  " I'll bet you'd like to get over and kill some of theme dirty Japs now, wouldn't you?"  We exchanged knowing winks.  I didn't tell those simple souls that I had been captured after a week at the front, and more to the point, what I knew and thought about killing dirty Germans, about total war.  The reason for my being sick at heart then and now has to do with an incident that received cursory treatment in the American newspapers.  In February, 1945, Dresden, Germany was destroyed, and with it over on hundred thousand human beings.  I was there.  Not many know how tough America got.

-Kurt Vonnegut,  Armageddon in Retrospect

On Being There............................

............................or, the myth of "quality time".......

"But people tend not to operate on cue. At least our moods and emotions don’t. We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones. The surest way to see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting and ready for them."

"There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence."