Today, when someone stands too close to me in a line, my first inclination is to say, “Dummy, don’t you have any awareness whatsoever?”

But I have developed a better delivered message, that others around me see as well. I don’t say anything; I just use four gestures. The first gesture is to point my finger at the person, you. My next gesture is to point my two fingers at my eyes, see. The third gesture is to hold my hand out in front of me palm up, stop. The fourth gesture is to point, with my index finger taping my temple, use your brain. The gestures just take a moment. They may take me for someone who’s speech is impaired, but I get their attention, and they back off. In my mind, I’m still saying “Wake up you moron.” I have a right not to be infected by somebody who is not paying attention. Semi-OK it’s not enough. I have a sort of a cranky optimism but I’m severely annoyed by behavior from certain people’s pestilence, phone dummy’s, pollution, climate change, and just annoying behavior especially by stupid people. We have to get back to doing what is possible and the people that say it can’t be done should just get out of the way. We have to act, train, and educate people, not to be morons.

Stay safe, isolate.

Take the time to concentrate on the task that you are doing. Multi-tasking and incompetence permeates our world and mistakes are becoming more frequent and consequential. Zen Concentration on the now means, not only the awareness of the moment, but the discipline to be awake to the people, environment, tasks, and the next twinkling of the universe. How can you reach this level of awareness if you do not take time to stop, look, listen, deliberately think, and are multi-tasking?

If you try to fail and succeed, what have you done?

Satoru

I was talking with a friend about motivation, competence, and Zen focus. We were comparing these actions in modern times to more primitive years, when if you did not work smart, hard, and strong, you did not survive. My contention is that man seeks to satisfy his desires by the amount of least exertion, and that we are just naked apes in a space age world. His contention was that the lack of motivation and competence was just based on being spoiled and stupidity. We might both be right or wrong. Then we saw this entertaining video. What do you think? https://youtu.be/IJMu0JZF7s8

My exceptional friend Richard Mavrovich sent me an email with the subject line, “The difference.” The message was an image of two panels shaped like the dashboard of a jet fighter. One-labeled WOMAN was covered with knobs, buttons, diodes, switches, and dials, complex, and almost unfathomable. The MEN box had but a single switch, labeled on and off. The “message” certainly makes men look simpler than women. Perhaps it is true, since most women associate sex with family, children, new life and new relationships, whereas men associate sex with life itself. For a man, being with a woman and making love, with all its intensity and intimacy, is a way of affirming a primal instinct of procreation and refuting death.

Do not make culmination type choices when you are too young, too inexperienced in life’s variables or too unsophisticated to understand all the permutations, because they can set the course of your life in a troubled direction. Especially, in the choice of relationships. Shop around.

Satoru

Everyone wants more money to have more disposable income to spend on goods and services to make them happier, making consuming the definition of progress. But we have excluded values such as leisure time, volunteer work, clean air, low crime and longer healthier lives into the calculations of more and happier. We have also turned the planets resources  into things we can consume, whether renewable or not. The real world has art, truth, wonders to satiate both the sophisticated and gross, beauty, and love, that should be enough. But everyone wants more. We only have to open our eyes to see that we already have everything we need. The world has too many unawares, all demanding exotic baubles and using too much of society’s energy to satisfy frivolous cravings, upsetting the exquisitely delicate balance between ecology and society.

Taste the Now, smell the infinite, feel the smooth skin, hear the silence and the music of the wind, develop a Technicolor mind, be blinded by the rainbows and see forever.

Satoru