Tag: #liberalmusician

Disclaimer uno: This was not proofread, it was dictated in one sitting onto my blog while in my bathtub. Please try to forgive the grammar and spellcheck errors. I will get to them soon.

I’ll bet there’s a lot of people in the world who would think that I have a perfect life because I don’t answer to anybody, I’m a single man I am finishing a career where I did what I want and what I loved which was teaching literature for many years and yielded a lot of time to do what I want. That is a perception, not necessarily a misperception. My response to that perception would be: yes it is true in three very crucial and important ways my life is more perfect than most. Everything in life we become jealous for and of is merely a construct and perception of the mind. I hope after reading this you will agree it is a fact that I kind of do have a perfect life, with a few disclaimers. But after reading my ecolumn, I hope you are able to shine a light on your own life as perfect, almost because you are a creator of your own perceptual outlook. For my first thing I’m thankful for, let’s chat about free time I possess.

Certain workaholics might say I do nothing everyday. Okay okay, what do you consider doing something. When I know all my socks are soiled and it’s time to wash them I do laundry because it’s just me I don’t have to do it very often and if I want to do it less often guess what I do I take a little bit of my income and I buy more brand new Hanes socks. So in a sense I am in control of my free time as far as doing laundry. I remember earlier in life when I was married and I had three children living in the house with us I was always making a schematic of my day sometimes just a day before or day after I’d be doing a review or a projection. This occupied a lot of my mental space. My philosophy was and still is to some extent to examine the weaknesses in your day when you don’t feel happy maybe even frustrated about your life. I’ve always believed that a lazy person doesn’t bother to analyze that I’m happiness and an industrious person makes every attempt to keep journals or even right on walls the idea of how they might avoid frustration in their day tomorrow. So back then for example if all my socks were soiled I knew in my mind that it was going to be a big bummer the next morning when I took off at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning to teach 10-year-olds which is what I did for a living for well over 20 years approaching 30 years actually I actually haven’t even measured it out because if you include subbing it probably amounts to more than 30 years. But I have worked with 10-year-olds I have worked with 18 year olds I’ve worked with people in their twenties thirties I’ve even had students at the community college who are in their 60s if you can believe that. Because my days as a teacher and a professor we’re always filled with challenges and sometimes I’ll admit it rare extreme human stress to solve problems in education. Because of this I developed sort of a fear in my rib cage it always felt like it was on the left side before a day would begin with these challenges I needed to be prepared. So I made a schematic of my day that included laundry. Laundry often included either fixing the dryer or the washer or going to the store or the bank to get quarters and living through the pandemic a lot of times the bank would not give you very many quarters I think it was $10 for the quarter for each citizen. I hope you’re getting the point what I’m trying to show you is that at that time I didn’t have a lot of free time I was always focused on how I could be a good provider and avoid those bottlenecks in my business of being a good husband and a good dad and a good teacher. The real point I want to make before I make my final point on this point that’s a lot of points is that free time is relevant to the person and the person’s perception some might say in the years where I was teaching K12 I had a boatload of free time but during those years I felt like I had very little free time and a lot of responsibilities that I had to catch up on even if it was a chance where I could meditate or be calm or pray or spend time with my spouse there’s always that nagging impulse in my brain saying you got to be prepared for tomorrow you got to be prepared for tomorrow. I don’t blame my dad for that I don’t blame my mom for that but somewhere along the line I developed a very irrational fear of tomorrow. So what’s my final point on this? Free time is perception and I didn’t have much until recently but even if you examine things as the Buddhists do for what they are not for what they seem I have two or three times more free time working part time then I had when I was working full time as a teacher. My takeaway on free time and how I have an almost perfect life is about perception and where do I shine the light if I shine the light on all the possible things that could go wrong I’m going to be busy from sun up to sundown preparing the soiled socks and such to me that challenge and you know what happens you never really give yourself a high five. Now with even more free time I find the real challenges to let go not hang on to my fears and my worries and my challenges that are supposedly going to come tomorrow. My real challenge is to be still and listen to ambient recordings of church bells and thunderstorms and all the wonderful ambient videos there are on YouTube have you checked them out they’re quite amazing but I digress I hope you get what I’m saying about free time it’s all about perception I do have a lot of free time I would define that by saying if you have enough free time to sit in a bathtub dictating a blog post about how much free time you have you ain’t hurting. In my closing sentence I will just say you can work on that perception you don’t have to be a slave to a mind that’s constantly telling you you have to prepare. Now on to the second thing: the lack of a spouse.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 55 years in this human skin it’s that people do not tell you what their real thoughts are. Whether it’s the checker who’s nervously making conversation with you to try and get you through and address the huge line that has grown behind you or whether it’s your spouse who says sweet nothings in your ear while secretly thinking why the heck am I still with this guy. I can guarantee you every relationship harbor’s silent feelings potential shares with the other that most the time go unsaid. The problem is we can’t handle it. I really picked up on this concept by Michael Singer he’s an incredible teacher that is on YouTube as well as his own site and his company if you will that produces these tapes and MP4s and such videos it’s called sounds true there’s a channel on YouTube if you’re interested in this section of my paper at all you might go and subscribe to it it seems Michael Singer and his YouTube channel is called sounds true he also has a website but I’ve never visited it I am a faithful subscriber and listener to him. He says we can’t handle it. he doesn’t get into a big diet tribe like psychologists do although he does respect psychology and therapy and Freud and young and all the ideas they’re in but he makes a very clear distinction between psychology and your mind and the being they called the inner being or your true self. The true self loves everything. The true self loves to please the spouse but the true self is not caught up in that. I don’t know what the ideal relationship would be but I think it would probably be two people that are self-actualized in their own peace and they have limitations on what they need to be happy and they really are happy living within those limitations. When you have a spouse around it’s different usually. It seems that everybody in high school especially the boys in high school because I was a boy in high school and I had a son are always concerned with who’s going to be their date to the homecoming dance and they have less concern about what kind of homework they need to do so they don’t stress out next week now this makes perfect sense. There is very little heatonistic component to studying. On the other hand if you go to sleep with your wife and your arms with a roughly nightgown tickling your chin which is the kind of scenario I had for 19 years it’s a little bit tempting it’s it’s a little bit wonderful. But alas this is a selfish desire that is not satisfied within the self. You can’t manifest someone else’s will it’s sort of like the genie that grants three wishes but he says I can’t make anybody fall in love with you. Having a spouse can be the most wonderful thing. Not having a spouse can be wonderful also. You don’t have to second guess what they’re thinking. Finding someone who wants to be your significant other it’s pretty easy. You just start hanging out places where you want to go and where you want to spend your time. The law of attraction feels those places up with people who are looking for the same thing as you. There’s only one problem. They have a brain and a spinal cord just like a fingerprint and guess what it’s different from yours. So in conclusion on this point while acquiring a spouse can happen in a fairly easy way. The perception of the beloved can and usually does change. So what’s the solution? Be alone. When you’re only in control of your own perception that you are indeed happy and your life is indeed perfect or at least more perfect than it used to be you’re a lot more relaxed you’re not waiting for a land of mine in other words where you realize your perception is not the same as your beloved it never has been. This is a huge heartbreaking pitfall romance and I highly recommend that you remain single. Still for an epoch people have sought out romantic love and I know they will continue to and a lot of people just listen to me give this kind of advice and they say well of course he’s old yes white hair he’s missing some of his front teeth of course he’s over love he can’t get love. This is something to ponder before you take me too seriously. So now let me move into my third point: on having the time to identify and do what I want.

I wish I could interview myself at age 14. I remember banging on the guitar wanting to make a band called The resonant pioneers just like the grand stating band from the arenas of the 1980s the alarm and it’s original lineup including Dave sharp, guitarist. I think I thought I knew everything heck maybe I did. There weren’t blogs at that time that was 1984. The first blogs I remember were from about 1998 and they were mostly male servers where people would add on to a thread and then it would email out according to a schedule. That turned into geocities which was bandwidth and space you could buy and put graphics up and put backgrounds up and learn HTML and make something like a blog. It didn’t have any regular subscriber widgets or things like that so it was nothing like the blogs of today but eventually for me that led to a software called wordpress. But I digress. When I was 14 I knew everything let’s just accept it. Didn’t you? The problem is you were the same brain and spinal cord looking in the mirror back then as you are now but you’ve had a lot of let downs and you’ve had a lot of people crush your spirit of course you’ve had help of course you’ve learned from the universe that there is a way in the darkest night in the morning is always better and bright. But you don’t know what you want that’s your problem. How can you know what you want. You’re so caught up in the noise in the chatter in your head that it’s impossible to calm down and feel anything. You are society. You are young people that I have taught at the community college level as well as all the grades from k to 12. I don’t care if you had 600 million dollars and you won the lottery and I heard of somebody the other day in a prayer request to someone else asking them to pray for her to win the lottery that person is missing it big time happiness doesn’t follow a lottery win adrenaline does and stress does and losing all your friends does but achieving your dream can happen with five bucks in one day and one afternoon and one morning in one dream. For this point it’s very simple you have to stop. I’m not talking about stop doing something like stop hitting your sister or stop picking your zits. I’m talking about a complete full body physical stop or you don’t think at least you do practice to hope that the thoughts will come through you and then not return to you that’s the same as not thinking if you know you need to go to work tomorrow and all your socks are soiled you have to spend at least 30 minutes to an hour getting your socks washed this is a fact. But what if you found out that all these things were not going right for you and you were getting so frustrated and making stupid mistakes because the universe was trying God I use the two interchangeably God or the universe was trying to turn your head down the road to a better life to a better job. I can tell you that’s exactly what happened to me. I always wanted to just blog and have a journal online I have that now. I always wanted to take photos of the sunrise and the sunset and become one with nature more and watch documentaries I now do that. When I first started meditating probably a year or two before my marriage ended I just wanted to have low blood pressure that was the only reason and I fished out of the junk drawer we had in our kitchen an old calendar that was made up of California sunsets the sun rises and places to go there were pictures of the redwoods their pictures of Hearst Castle there were pictures of beaches all across all down Southern California. This is where I learned to meditate in my own way. One of the first meditation ambient recordings that I read was by a man named Deepak Chopra a medical doctor a giant in the consciousness tent. He’s right up there with eckert holy. But as I listen to some of his introductory ones that were few minutes long he would say chance this what do I want, what do I want. While I agree with my first precious teacher I have to make an issue with that just saying what do I want is a nice way to open a door to a lot more open space about a given subject that’s a really find out and help someone who doesn’t know what they want is to make them comfortable is to give them things they want is to give them money even depending on how much you value them if it’s someone very close to me that just is not exhibiting that they’re doing what they want because they don’t know what they want then that’s the person I write my next book about.

So, in conclusion I think the key takeaway here and the takeaway that I hope you would all get it’s one word perception. My life is great and I get to take naps and I get to rest and I get to organize and I get to clean without worrying so much about a 9:00 to 5:00 60 hour work week job I’ll give you that but I can’t sit here and lie to you and say that when I see a couple picking out pears from the stack at Albertsons and the husband wipes the hair out of the wife’s face and tells her she looks beautiful I cannot lie I miss that life. But at the same time after the pain of losing that life and being attached to that life and some kind of perception of that life which really Buddhism teaches us that everything is perception there is a reality but we’re so far from it because we have preferences. We want life to adhere to some internal learning that we got that is lying to us everyday and saying this is the way you can be happy you don’t need that that’s called the construct and if then statement what if statement directions to building a model airplane but I digress.

So in talking about free time and talking about a job and a career that has ended and left you a lot of time we also address what you want out of that time and if you don’t know what you want you might as well not even occupy the space of free time because you’re wasting it every minute of our lives as humans should be spent jotting down ideas whether mentally and you can’t remember a lot of stuff mentally that’s a whole other blog post that I’m going to do down the road I’ve been way too much of a journal and less of a doer you need to be a doer you need to be a beer a b e r so I hope that all made sense to you and I hope you understand about perception the key to happiness is not having everything around you that you enjoy and that makes you happy the key to happiness or as the phrase I’ve been sharing a lot lately the way out is in. Say it again the way out is in have you memorized your favorite songs what if you were locked up in El Salvador would you remember songs to enjoy all by yourself with no electronics? folks with all that’s happening this is not a drill you need to tend to your core you need to love yourself you need to practice self-care you need to stop spending so much money and put some of it away for a rainy day and that’s what you heard from Damien Riley today I hope you enjoyed it please leave me a thumbs up please subscribe and if you have anything to say please please start a dialogue with me in the comments everybody who comes here and reads my stuff benefits when commenters comment so thank you.