The Idea: The importance of allotting time, every day, to stop thinking and just be.
A few weeks ago Rob
Paterson pointed me to this post on Evelyn Rodriguez' Crossroads
Dispatches blog, with this wonderfully ambiguous quote from Wu Li:
Before
enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After
enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
and this quote from Linus Torvalds' Just Barely Enough Design:
Nobody
should start to undertake a large project.
You start with a small trivial
project,
and you should never expect it to get large.
I've
taken this "don't try to run before you walk" advice to heart in the
evolution of AHA! The Discovery and Learning Centre -- slow, natural,
collaborative, under-engineered at first.
But it seems to me there's a deeper message in the Wu Li quote. It's
not so much about attention to detail or accepting the necessity of
routine or living a simple life as it is about living in the moment. Paying attention.
Since getting back from Montreal I've been trying to take it easy to
recuperate from the kidney stones, which are still causing me some
discomfort, apparently because they have caused an infection in my
system. I am drinking eight glasses of water per day, per doctor's
orders, and, because the season continues to be so cold and miserable
(more snow and hail today) I'm still stoking the high-efficiency
fireplace every hour or so when I'm at home and awake. So I am, in
fact, chopping wood and carrying water regularly every day. The
slowdown has given me more time to think, and except for a pile-up of
e-mail has not significantly reduced my work productivity. The
remembrance of last week's extreme pain and the lesser recurrences
since then have made me somehow more alert, more attentive, in my
comfortable moments. There is seemingly less noise in my head.
Just this small amount of progress has convinced me to add Live In The Moment to my Getting Things Done "to do" list, under the category every day.
I have flagged this project as Important and allotted an hour a day to
it. It will be an experiment -- I'll have to figure out what precisely
I will invest this time in, but I have some ideas. I know walking in
the woods with Chelsea seems to be effective. I am going to try to
allot some of this time to physical exercise, which has been effective
in the past, at least until procrastination sets in. I will keep trying
to learn to meditate, which so far has not worked as well. I think I
may try to learn to cook vegetarian food. The time spent chopping and
stacking and carrying wood will count. One way or another, I am
promising myself to spend an hour every day doing something that is
purely physical, and during that time to avoid abstract thinking, quiet
the noise, let go and just focus on being, on sensing, on paying
attention.
It's my personal healing program, I guess. I'm just wondering why it
took a physical illness to make me realize that something so important
was absent from my otherwise wonderful Getting Things Done list. Now
I'm asking myself what else that's important is missing from the list.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
