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Chop Wood, Carry Water

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chopping

When the mind is not crowded
By imaginary things,
It is the best season of your life.

-Kabir

I just chopped twelve hundred needless words from this article, which is fitting, because the point of all that blathering was to warn against getting lost in abstractions.

I think too much. Virtually all of us do, it’s no secret. Anyone who even once experiments with meditation discovers in seconds how difficult it is just to sit and experience the physical only. We don’t think our thoughts so much as they outright assault us, so it’s no wonder we have a tendency to fall into resonance with our thoughts and lose sight of our physical experience.

You can take a ten-minute walk to the grocery store, and spend the whole walk with your attention completely hijacked by a line of thought that has nothing do to with walking or groceries. A foreign war, a past relationship, or an internal dialogue about fuel prices easily becomes more demanding of your attention than the boulevards, birdsongs and urban infrastructure that actually comprise the experience of a ten-minute walk. Read More

by David Cain on December 21, 2009
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Two Simple Tricks to Be More Comfortable in Your Own Skin

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alone in a crowd

I’ve received a fair bit of email asking me to write about how to be more comfortable in your own skin, particularly in unfamiliar places. Many report some level of anxiety at the thought of venturing into crowded venues, exploring new neighborhoods, or traveling alone.

I won’t pretend I’ve conquered self-consciousness in all its forms, but I can see my preparedness for dealing with the unfamiliar is miles from where it once was.

As a benchmark of how far I’ve come, I often reminisce with some embarrassment how my heart used to beat a little faster even at the thought of ordering pizza over the phone. It’s difficult to comprehend now what exactly I found intimidating about it, but I know that that was reality for me at one point.

Not long ago (maybe two years) I was not in a state of mind where I would be willing to confront the intrinsic uncertainties and risks of shipping myself off to another country. I’ve been on the road for seven weeks in unfamiliar parts of three countries and I’ve run into surprisingly few situations where I could not relax into whatever new scene I’ve found myself in.

I’ve learned a few tricks that really help create ease in situations where you don’t exactly feel like a fish in water. I’ll share two simple ones that you may want to try if you’re feeling a bit out of your element somewhere. Read More

by David Cain on December 3, 2009
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What Five Days of Silence Taught Me

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Mainland British Columbia, from the shore at Hollyhock

Just before flying to Thailand, I spent five days at a retreat community called Hollyhock. It’s a humble, rootsy little hamlet on the relatively remote Cortes Island. I knew very little about the program I’d signed up for, only that it was about Buddhism.

It turns out that it was a rather intense regimen of meditation. Our group of fifteen or so spent virtually our entire days (from 7am to 10pm) in some form of meditation. Sitting, walking, dancing and even eating. I’ve experimented with meditation, but never for extended periods. This was a bit of a shock, finding myself sitting in a candlelit hut with nothing to do for hours but stare into my own mind.

In the tradition of Theravada monks, we undertook several Buddhist precepts, including refraining from consuming intoxicants, and refraining from killing people for the duration the five days. We also observed “noble silence” which means we were not to talk or engage other people, even with mere eye contact. Read More

by David Cain on November 5, 2009
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How to Improve Your Handwriting (or Anything Else) at Will

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handwriting

When I was taking French classes a few months ago, we were each asked to write a composition in French and pass it to another classmate to read. It struck me then that I very seldom write more than a Post-It note’s worth these days. By the end of a paragraph, my hand is cramped and sore.

And what an ugly paragraph I created. My letters were inconsistent and strangled. To this day, after nearly twenty-five years of handwriting experience, I suck. With considerable shame, I passed my composition, which demonstrated both the penmanship and language skills of a six-year-old French boy, to another classmate.

As if to redeem me, I received an even uglier paragraph from the student to my left.

My generation is lost for handwriting. I’m a computer person. I write thousands of words a week, almost entirely by pushing buttons. My penmanship skills are rarely called upon, and I know I’m not the only one.

After a few weeks of class, I had a chance to see everyone’s penmanship at least once. It ranged from virtually indecipherable to pretty good, but none approached the elegant cursive one might see in a Christmas card from an aunt born before the war. Read More

by David Cain on October 15, 2009
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Ethanol Free — 30 Days Without Drugs Update

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alcohol shot

On July 6, 2009, David began an experiment in which he resolved not to use any sort of drugs for 30 days. View the full experiment log here.

Day 22

Well I’m down to little more than a week left, and it really has not been difficult. There have been a few brief moments where I felt a bit left out, but any angst always went away fast, and I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on any fun that only drugs would have allowed me to have.

I will say though, that part of the ease has been the knowledge that I will be allowed to indulge if I want after the 30 days is up. Not that it’s that appealing, but if my commitment had been six months, it may not have felt so easy on a day-to-day basis.

But such a lengthy abstinence is not necessary. Basically, I have two goals with this experiment:

1) Find out what I feel like physically after not having ingested any drugs for a while, and

2) Discover if my social life and working life have developed a need for caffeine and alcohol.

So far I’ve discovered that (1) I feel physically awesome almost all the time, and (2) I have been able to both work and have fun just the same without drugs.

I can’t say I’m not excited at the thought of having a few beers with my buddies after the experiment is over, or enjoying a traditional after-dinner coffee with my mom. I really do want to do those things, but mainly because I feel like I can bring a new sense of awareness and appreciation to the experience.

Of course, reintroducing drugs into my life means conscious moderation. Staying away from years-old habits for a month isn’t going to obliterate them. Read More

by David Cain on July 29, 2009
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Moments Can’t Be Captured

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Deer tracks

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”

~Cesare Pavese

By six o’clock on a Sunday night, the streets of Invermere were deserted.  It was early fall, the middle of dead season for a skier’s town, and I was trotting down to the highway to hitchhike back up the mountain, to the resort where I lived and worked.  It had rained earlier, and the damp streets were glowing with one final hour of of sun before it ducked behind the mountains.

I’d spent the day in town, alone, on what was as much a photo-taking excursion as a grocery run.  Walking along a silent residential street, I passed an overgrown picket fence, peered nosily into the adjacent yard, and saw something that made me stop. Read More

by David Cain on July 16, 2009
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This Will Never Happen Again

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Post image for This Will Never Happen Again

Nothing is permanent.  That’s not really news, but it may mean more than you think, on a day-to-day level.

In each moment, everything around you is constantly changing, and it never changes back. It’s always new.

Some changes are subtle, some dramatic, but all of it is changing.

Life is uncertain by its very nature.  Except for this:

No matter what is happening right now,

It will never happen again.

Not quite like this anyway. Read More

by David Cain on June 4, 2009
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David vs. Monkey Mind — Meditation Experiment: Day 15

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Monkey mind

David began a 30-day daily meditation experiment on April 6, 2009.  The original post is here. David’s progress log is here.

Well it’s been a real trip so far.  Here we are at the halfway point.

After a rocky first week, I’ve settled into a comfortable groove.  But it took a bit of trailblazing.  About a week ago I decided not to follow a prescribed traditional method.  I didn’t want to compromise it with my own assumptions.  I wasn’t comfortable with written or prerecorded instruction.  I felt an intense need for a flesh-and-blood teacher to show me.

And I will find a teacher, either in a meditation class, or on some sort of retreat, but not during this experiment.  I decided to take a more free-form approach to my daily sessions, and it’s beginning to pay great dividends.  Read More

by David Cain on April 21, 2009
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The Secret to Connecting With People

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Deep eye

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

~ Ernest Hemingway

For a long time I didn’t feel like I had a lot of people to relate to.  Being shy, I didn’t find myself in a lot of conversations with people I didn’t know, and when I did, I was uncomfortable.  Bonds did form, deep ones sometimes, but it was always a product of circumstance.  I made friends with people I was in class with or worked with, because some interaction is bound to happen in those places.  But to actually form a relationship without the help of circumstances was something I had never experienced.

I’ve shed much of my shyness through deliberately speaking up more and other forms of comfort-zone-pushing, but I eventually made a discovery that really opened the floodgates for me.  I see the potential for connection in just about everyone now; I no longer feel bound by differences of age, interests, cultures, or opinions.

The secret to connecting with people is Read More

by David Cain on April 5, 2009
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The Most Important Thing I Ever Learned

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Clothesline of photos

If you read Raptitude you’ll see me talk a lot about moments.  By the end of this post you’ll understand why I use that word so much.  I grew up thinking the word moment referred to specific instants in time, usually where some significant event occurred.  There were historic moments, life-changing moments, poignant moments, tense moments, touching moments, Kodak moments. They were events to be remembered, reminisced about, or photographed.

Whatever they were, they held you captive.  Everything else seemed to drop away, and you just watched.  They seemed to be isolated from the normal, linear course of time.

As for the rest of life, it just seemed to be the normal, steady current of ‘stuff.’  Some fun, some pain, some hope, some confusion, some excitement, some tedium.  Same same but different.

When I was twenty, desperately leafing through some forgotten self-help book, I came across a peculiar line.  Read More

by David Cain on April 1, 2009
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