Book review: “How to Train a Wild Elephant (& Other Adventures in Mindfulness)” by Jan Chozen Bays

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I have been a wannabe Buddhist for decades now. I love its core ideas, and I accept the Four Noble Truths, but I find it difficult to practice any of the devotions or the meditations. My mind is just too busy and clouded with samsara.

So I was pleasantly attracted by the title of this book.

The human mind – your mind, my mind – is the “wild elephant” of the title. It runs in all directions at once. How do we tame it? This book offers suggestions.

I’ve found some of them very useful.

Examples:

Take three deep breaths. I close my eyes while doing this. Here’s the thing: don’t think. Slowly: inhale/exhale, inhale/exhale, inhale/exhale. Now open your eyes.

This is not just a calm-down exercise, or a “Serenity Now!” mantra. Just think about yourself, and your breathing, for a few seconds.

It works.

Whenever you see someone during the day, think: “This may be the last time I ever see him/her.” It reminds you of mortality. It keeps you from treating them slightingly or badly. And who knows? Once in a while it may be true.

Notice the color blue. This sounds stupid, but it’s very effective. Blue is the sky color, but it’s also everywhere. Take a moment and notice all the bits and pieces of blue around you. You’ll be astounded.

And the most difficult of all: When you’re eating, just eat. Take a bite, chew it, and swallow it. Do not take another bite until you’ve completely chewed and swallowed the first one. Make yourself aware of the taste of the food. Don’t read, or watch TV, or talk. Just eat, slowly and with appreciation.

Slowly, step by step, breath by breath, bite by bite, we may actually achieve nirvana.

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Studying calculus at an advanced age

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A friend of mine on Facebook mentioned Coursera recently. I respect his opinions, so I went to check it out.

It’s for real. It’s a website where you can find college-level courses offered for free. Really.

Okay. So I never took calculus in high school or college, and I saw that that Coursera was offering “Calculus 101.”

What could it hurt? It’s an online course. It must be very gentle, right?

Brother, was I wrong.

This is a complete thorough-going college-level course in calculus, with lectures, and homework, and quizzes, and a textbook (all free).

I’m barely through with the first week, and I’m already terrified.

I haven’t felt this way since high school.

Calculus turns out to be demanding and difficult, which is not good for my ossifying over-fifty brain.

Every evening I resolve to quit the course, and every evening I try again.

Now: can someone tell me: how do you multiply square roots? I’ve forgotten.

And I need to know by next Friday’s quiz.

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A long career and a happy one

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Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times solicits questions from her readers. She posts them, asks her readers to send in responses, and then weaves the whole thing into a column two weeks later.

A recent question went something like this: “I’m around thirty, and I’m very happy with what I’m doing. All my friends are looking for newer, higher-level positions, and are telling me that I’m crazy for wanting to stay put. Question: am I doing the wrong thing?”

This is an excellent question to put to someone like me, who’s been with his current employer since 1987, and has held his current position since 1999.

Answer: why not stay in your current job, if you’re happy?

But this is what will really happen if (like me) you stick with one job for the long haul:

For a while, while you’re new, you’ll see your contemporaries come and go. Some will stick around, but most will move on. (I’m assuming you’re under forty. If you’re over forty and starting a new job, probably you have different ideas. But read on.)

After about ten years, you’ll become part of the wallpaper: no one will notice you. You’re now a drone. No one will worry too much about offending you, because – why would they? You’re not gonna quit. (This can be a difficult phase. You will have the sense that people are looking down on you. And you know what? Some of them will look down on you. You are now, to use another Lucy Kellaway term, a “bumbler.”)

Then, around twenty years into your tenure, you will begin to notice that people are giving you a kind of peculiar respect. You’ve been there since forever, and everyone knows that. You can make things happen. You know who to talk to, and whom to call. You have faced a variety of crises, and not a single one of them came close to killing you.

Your personal appearance will be a little weathered, probably. But you will go on and on. Sto lat, as they say on your birthday in Poland: “a hundred years.”

And now, the last verse of a poem by Elinor Wylie (d. 1929):

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile.

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Beard

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Well, we have our first cancer-related casualty: my poor little beard.

 

 

It was such a helpless little thing, like a baby possum clinging to my face. Regardez:

 

My radiation oncologist warned me that my beard would probably go thin on one side, given that they’d be pumping all kinds of protons and neutrons and gamma radiation into my left tonsil. “Probably,:” he said,” you should shave your beard off now. It’ll look irregular after a little while.”

 

 

Pooh, I though.

 

 

Then, last week, I was stroking my beard while watching TV, and I looked down, and found that I’d yanked five or six white hairs right out of my chin without even trying.

 

 

Dearie me!

 

 

Beard loss speeded up after that. I could pull out a few dozen hairs at a time by the weekend. The beard looked okay on the right-hand side of my chin, but on the left, it was sort of a hair archipelago, like a map of Polynesia.

 

 

Finally, on Tuesday morning, I looked in the mirror and covered the right side of my chin with my hand. “No beard,” I said. Then I covered the left-hand side. “Beard,” I said. I continued this (idiotically) for about ten seconds, swapping sides. “Beard. No beard. Beard. No beard. Beard . . . “

 

 

No Beard won the contest. I attacked my chin with a regular razor and finished up with my rotary. And now I look something like this:

 

 

 

Am I not striking?

 

 

Only three-and-a-half weeks of radiation therapy to go.

 

 

And, frankly, if that’s the worst of it, I’m a lucky lucky boy.

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Everything is equally important

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We had a two-day office retreat / meeting a few weeks ago. We listened to presentations, and lunched together (twice). I got to know some of my co-workers better. Most of them I respect more than I did before; one or two, not so much.

One exercise, however, was odd.

In a morning session, we were asked to come up with things that might improve our departmental performance. These were condensed (by a team in the back of the room, over the course of a few hours) to twenty-four suggestions. At 3:00 pm that afternoon, we were given little electronic voting devices with five keys labeled “A” through “E,”  and asked to vote on the importance of each. “A” was very important; “E” was very unimportant.

We were supposed to be going home by 4pm.

By 3:15pm, we’d only gone through a few of them. So the moderators of the session speeded up the voting.

Result: almost everything got voted “very important” or “important.” Only one or two things rated “medium.” On the plus side: we were done by 3:55pm.

What does this mean?

One interpretation: everything’s important.

Another interpretation: the voting didn’t mean anything. People were tired, or pushing whatever button they felt like.

Another interpretation: people were afraid to undervalue things, so they always voted high.

Yet another interpretation: most of the suggestions were pretty vague, or pretty universal – “We need better communication!”, for example – and how can you vote “Not very important” on something like that?

And one more: people wanted out of there, so they were voting high, with the unconscious assumption that if they liked everything, things would move more quickly.

How important do you think this exercise was?

Yes, I agree with you. It was very important.

But for a different reason than the planners of the retreat had intended.

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The hundred-and-eight sorrows

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I am not a Buddhist really. (Just ask Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse about that, and he’ll agree.) But I know some Buddhist doctrine, and it has actually helped me stumble through life.

How many different ways to suffer are there, do you think?

There are exactly one hundred and eight.

There are six senses in the Buddhist world view: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, and (the one we Westerners forget) the mind. Suffering can enter through all six of these.

What enters? The six stimuli: things we like, things we dislike, things we don’t care about, things that bring us joy, things that bring us suffering, things that make us feel nothing at all. Things we like may be bad for us (like alcohol). Things we dislike (like bitter medicine) may make us suffer, though they’re good for us physically. Things we don’t care about may be vitally important, but we don’t realize it. Joy is wonderful but it never lasts, and its departure causes suffering. Unhappiness is suffering itself. Indifference can lead to suffering later, through regret.

Six senses x six stimuli = 36.

All six stimuli can be past (remembering the six stimuli), present (experiencing them in the moment), or future (anticipating them).

36 x the three time periods of past / present / future = 108.

These are the hundred-and-eight sorrows.

In some Buddhist practices, there are commemorations of the number 108: 108 prostrations before the Lord Buddha, 108 circumambulations of his statue. Sometimes they ring a bell 108 times at the New Year.

Try this exercise: think of something you do, something you love or hate or don’t care about in the least. It will be one of the hundred-and-eight.

 

 

How about smoking? I smoked for fourteen years. I liked the way it tasted back them.

 

 

So: (sensation: taste) x (stimulus: liking) x (time: past).

 

 

And now I have throat cancer, almost certainly as a result of those fourteen years of smoking. (See also karma.)

 

 

The one-hundred-and-eight sorrows go on and on, endlessly, so long as there’s a single unenlightened being in the entire universe.

 

 

We need to realize them, and name them, and let them go.

 

 

Then we can move on to whatever comes next.

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For Sunday: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance “The Continental” (1935)

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“The Continental” was the first song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song, in the movie “The Gay Divorcee,” back in 1935.

 

 

This is a video of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to the tune in the movie. They are wonderful together.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

 

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Counting coins

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My bank, TDBank, is very good. Its rates are low, and its staff members are invariably friendly. (It’s one of the main reasons I transferred my account over from the expensive unfriendly Citizens Bank a few years ago.) Also, TDBank has many hidden advantages. For example: its foreign exchange rates are very low (perhaps because it’s based in Canada).

Also: it has a coin-counting machine in its lobby.

This is a huge advantage for people like me who hoard coins. I learned the habit from my parents, who hoarded them also; in my childhood, we spent many happy evenings counting and rolling coins.

But rolling coins is tedious. It’s so much easier to feed them into a coin-counting machine and take the resulting calculation to the cashier and get your money. (Every bit of it, mind you, not like CoinStar, which keeps 10% or more of it as a “fee.”)

The TDBank machine is set up for children. There’s an animated character on the viewscreen named “Penny,” who talks you through the whole process. “My goodness,” she says periodically, “you sure have saved up a lot of money!”

This is a little annoying, but there you are.

The other day, when I was running some coins through the machine, Penny stopped suddenly. “You’ve save up so much money,” she said, “that I’ve filled up my coin sack! An attendant will come help you shortly.”

And an attendant did. As she finished up, she turned to me and said (I thought): “Just touch your nose and you’ll resume.”

I thought she was joking, or that I’d misheard. So I touched my nose.

The attendant grimaced and pointed to the viewscreen. “Her nose,” she said. “Touch her nose.”

Ah. It all made sense suddenly.

Am I not a stupid funny old man?

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Journeys

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I wrote recently about my distaste for the word “battle” as used to describe a person’s life with cancer. There are obvious similarities: yes, I suppose you could say we’re fighting for our lives. But – um – does that mean that dying is the same as losing the battle? I’d rather think not.

 

 

I’ve decided that it’s more like a journey. You’ve left your humdrum normal life, and you’ve set sail on unknown dangerous seas. Nothing is familiar anymore. It’s scary, kids.

 

 

You have a goal: getting rid of the cancer. It’s possible. Other people have done it. You’re not completely alone: you have friends and supporters, and if you’re lucky (as I am), you also have a partner who loves you. You have doctors who help you chart your course. (My hematologist even has someone in her office who’s the “navigator” – planning treatment schedules, coordinating with other doctors’ offices, etc.)

 

 

Journeys have all kinds of endings, don’t they?

 

 

–         You make it to the end of the journey, but it’s not quite what you thought it would be. You don’t suddenly win the game. You realize, after what you’ve gone through, that you can never be sure of “tomorrow” again. You completed one journey, but now it turns out (in case you didn’t know) that life is just one damned journey after another.

–         You run into unexpected complications. You get nasty side effects. You catch a random virus from a stranger who sneezes on the back of your neck while you’re on the bus. Suddenly your seven-week journey is a ten-week journey, or a three-month journey.

–         You decide not to take the journey after all, or you begin and decide to turn back. What happens then? I suppose you hope for a miracle to pick you up and drop you at the finish line: you pray, or just dumbly hope, for an Act of God. (For me, this is a non-starter. God is not going to cook up any Acts of God for me, especially after the way I’ve talked about him.)

 

 

Journeys are strange and unpredictable. You do your very best, with the help you’re given, to make your way through unfamiliar and changing terrain. And you realize that you’re not really in control much of the time; it’s just out of your hands. Sometimes the end of the journey is way beyond any horizon you can imagine.

 

 

So get off your ass and pick up that One Ring and take it to Mount Doom.

 

 

Even if you don’t know the way.

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Sense of taste

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One of the “minor” side effects of both radiation and chemotherapy is the loss of one’s sense of taste.

 

 

Well, not so much “loss.” More of a horrible transformation.

 

 

I had one of my favorite Japanese dishes recently: ahiru donburi, strips of grilled duck and bits of scallion scattered in a bowl of rice. Delicious! But a bit – hem – metallic.

 

 

Then wheat bread began to taste like cigarette ashes.

 

 

I tried a McDonald’s hamburger and fries recently. The fries were perfectly inedible, like pieces of uncooked leather. The burger tasted as if it had been marinated in Clorox.

 

 

Meat’s not good anymore, nor is bread.

 

 

What’s left? Chocolate pudding. Frozen yogurt. Lemonade. Soup. Rice Chex. Cheerios. Grape Nuts. Marshmallow Peeps! Mashed potatoes.

 

 

I told this to Apollonia, who was philosophical. “Take a lesson from Robocop,” she said. “Robocop ate a rudimentary paste.”

 

 

“A what?”

 

 

“A rudimentary paste,” she said carefully. “And now that’s what you’re going to have to eat too.”

 

 

“I wish I were Robocop right now,” I said. “I know what I’d do.”

 

 

“Calm yourself,” Apollonia said severely. “That’s the chemotherapy talking.”

 

 

So: anyone for some nice rudimentary paste?

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