Tag: activity
On Camping and “The Chatter of the Mind”
For the last 10 years in a row, we’ve gone to Camp Swatara to…almost rough it as a family.
We just got back yesterday afternoon and began the de-camping process. 6 loads of laundry and putting things away for 3 hours. It’s more tiring than camping, and camping includes foraging for firewood to sustain your life.
For the first time, I didn’t take a single picture of our time away. (The photo above is from the camp website. It’s nondescript enough to resemble us.) It seems strange that I didn’t take any now that it’s done.
It’s an interruption to take photos sometimes, so honestly, I didn’t even think about it. My mind was chattering and I was more “in the moment”.
Later, off course, the photos come in handy to help you remember what happened. Right now, I think I remember something about killing 30 flies with the swatter and the surge of gratification that gave me–and something about S’mores.
My least favorite things about camping:
1. Too much humidity (Towels dry outside on the clothesline….never.)
2. Feeling covered in dirt and sweat 95% of the time
3. Feeling covered in sunscreen and bug spray over the layers of dirt and sweat
4. Bugs and all sort of biting and buzzing insects
5. Walking outdoors to use the indoor bathroom facilities
6. Thin mattresses that cause aches and pains
7. The hyper-vilgilengce about poison ivy and occasionally getting it.
(It all sounds like a dream-come-true, right?)
(some of) My most favorite things about camp
1. Having friends visit
2. The hospitality inherent in the camping community (sharing, chatting by the fire, friendly greetings as you walk around)
3. Family togetherness. Yes, it’s forced on you, but you can really start to enjoy it, usually.
4. The way things smell when the dew evaporates off the leaves in the morning.
5. How the day eases into the night and the darkness that comes to ease you into sleeping
6. Overcoming crisis together. Yes, it’s pretty awful at the time, but great memories and bonding come later.
7. Making fire and cooking with it, or using the firepit as a homing device. It’s hypnotic and primal and warm.
8. The refinement that happens when you realize what you truly need, compare to what you think you need. It turns out that you want things you don’t need.
What you really need: water, food, dry shelter and clothing, each other. What you think you need: a faster laptop.
In the end, you have kids that look forward very happily to the time away, and two parents (me and Tim, obviously) who are happy it’s part of our summertime, even though the whole process is challenging.
It’s actually the challenge that creates the satisfaction later, but you don’t know that unless you try it the whole way through.
If you aren’t psychologically ready to endure, you can get bitter or regretful (…um…so I’ve heard). Plus, it’s a dry camp, so there’s no wine to easy you into it.
The other thing is that intact families tend to camp together. I didn’t have this growing up and it’s a gift I give my children and myself now.
Yes, sometimes “split-up” families camp, too. But, mine didn’t.
Usually broken up families have a lot more scheduling issues and conflicts. Camping as an activity gets pushed to the side, unless you are very dedicated about it and keep it up.
And then there’s the Chatter of the Mind
And sometimes, though not this time, I get to hear less from the planning and inner monologue part of my “chattering mind”.
In general, this chatter may be telling you that you forgot ziplock bags at home or that, or that despite your efforts, you really aren’t worth much in the world, or that you should have cleaned out the vacuum filter more thoroughly, or that you made a mistake in explaining something, or that the people you were just talking to think poorly of you, or that you have to cook something that requires 14 steps… and how will be working out anyway, or the plans for the afternoon and where and how to apply sunscreen properly for it, or any number of things.
There isn’t much quiet in and about our minds, and not for very long.
It’s called thinking. It can be incessant. It’s not just me, right?
If you finally reach that place in time and space where the chatter dies down, it’s almost deafening, actually. At first.
It tends to happen, not on family camping trips, but when I retreat away from home and I go alone. After 2-3 hours of intensional quietness–dialing down everything things improve. But that’s only when I’m being disciplined about getting away and pushing every nuisance thought back, or submitting it to paper, each time one surfaces. If not, it can take days, and too often never happens at all.
And after you tamp down or divert each thought pelting your brain you realize you’ve been breathing all wrong for much too long. You haven’t been able to separate the planning from the enjoying and looking around. You’ve forgotten the things you love or you have not noticed the things you should.
It doesn’t happen all at once that the chatter starts bullying you, but it happens.
(To come to my next retreat trip, click here.)
The chatter is an adversary that comes in pretending to be helpful and careful, as if it has your best interests in mind. But really, it’s just making you weary by using up too much valuable “mental RAM”, like (foolishly) running windows on top of a Mac Operating System.
How’s your mental RAM these days, anyway? Up to snuff?
Can you remember the last time you didn’t experience “the chatter of your mind” for some length of time?
(If you’re thinking about that now, or much of anything, then now is not one of those times.)
And if settling it all down sounds too close to death, then it’s been too long.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Summer Hiatus (2014)
I’ve decided to commence a summer hiatus.
Most of my blogging and most of my social media activity will be reduced. I’m thinking somewhere around 85% (but maybe more).
If you’d like to contact me, I’ll be checking my email a few times per week. You can use the contact tab.
I’ve already been scaling back. The spirit is moving and I a sense that “permission to not produce” in online formats over these next few warm months is important right now.
I’ve been posting entries 2-3 times a weeks for such a long time. So, it’s weird. It’s like shedding skin, I suppose. The bigger challenge may be reducing my online reading, at this point!
I covet your prayers and I hope you’ll be here when I get back.
And yes, I’ll send up dispatches (once in a while) and I’ll also let you know when things will be rolling here again.
For those of you in the North America, may your enjoy your summer. I plan to and it feels freeing already.
Love and peace,
Lisa
Protected: Stepping into the quiet: before Discernment (follow up post; part II)
The Myth of Ordinary Time
Do you have time to read this?
That may depend on what language you speak.
Have you ever felt like when you’re creating or otherwise “in the zone” you pass into a strange pocket in the space-time continuum (or whatever) where the passage of time appears to almost be standing still. Then, when you’re jolted from your pocket, you find that time has actually moved along far faster than you would have guessed.
That is likely what it’s like (all the time) for someone living near the equator. More on that in a moment.
There’s something about relativity here and we’ll unpack it.
Consider too, the other side. Sometimes you are very conscious of time maybe because you’re in a bad meeting or you’d rather be somewhere else and the hands on the wall clock seem to barely move. That is because you are perceiving time in relation to other things and not experiencing is as it passes.
So, it seems experienced time works in an eerily timeless way (having no easily determinable passage of time), and referred to time (Ex. “That man spoke for 20 minutes.”) is a measurement or qualifier of time, but not at all a direct experience of time. It refers to only a memory of certain period, but one that was not recognized necessarily in the moments in which it truly happened. Time is marked outside of itself. So…
Time is never really ordinary.
Perception is powerful. Here’s some potent proof.
Time near the Equator:
Residents of places near the equator experience time completely differently than people who live in temperate climates. You already know this to be true.
Maybe you’ve heard of “island time”…
…if you’ve ever vacationed on a warm tropical island, things just mosey along. Maybe things will get done and maybe not. People get to things when they do, or whatever. “Hey, Relax Mon”. It can be a hassle when you’re not used to it. However, time is literally experienced differently.
It’s not the heat bringing a lack of motivation. They are used to the heat. It’s not a mere lack of a work ethic. It’s not simply enjoying the weather too much to be bothered with revving up to tackle hectic things.
It turns out that the passage of time is harder to discern because markers are missing.
Most often, for humans, change punctuates time in our awareness.
An event (accident, holiday, birth, death, full moon, dawn, solar eclipse, victory, loss, etc.), or a change in weather are the most common markers. With more changes–especially ones that involve rain and snow, brilliant leaf color changes, or a blast of Spring blooming–that means that our perception of time’s passage are further clarified. Our memories are literally shaped differently and therefore our brains are, at the cellular level, wired differently. Perception is relative. Variety, repetition, and influence change the brain’s capturing of data which determines the comprehending of time. It affects the awareness people have and the activities people undertake.
Seasons, and the things that are attached to them (growing of food, for one example) make the ability to plan more perceptible and pronounced. Need to buy wheat seed for Spring in a few months? Better save now. Plants grow all-year-round? Then, nevermind.
Residents of equatorial climates do not experience the massive change in seasons, plus they do not experience the great shortening of daylight either. For them, unless they’ve been influenced by outsiders, the passage of time happens in the present. Right now, or it’s not really real.
For pole-dwellers (people living in the northern and southern regions of the globe) time is usually experienced two ways:
1. through remembering past events
(A locked down thing that doesn’t truly exist except in the mind)
Or
2. through planning (projecting to the future to a not yet real time and place).
Pole-dwellers spend far less time–“Zen-like”–in the here and now.
In fact, being “stayed in the present” can be discredited as somehow wasteful by those who like to plan. Interesting argument of which is wasteful, and why, right?
For pole-dwellers it’s an ironic thing too, because if your mind is not attached to the present, you essentially are not fully aware of living at all in real-time…Instead you are aware of life passing in relation to something else. Time perhaps is more like a point on a map–over there–more than an experience. Perhaps a counterfeit experience compared to the real thing or real-time? I’m not sure.
Or on the other side, near the equator, planning might seem pointless or amorphous. A sort of figment.
• Living solely in the present has disadvantages too. It comes packaged with a (undetectable) lack of impetus that can help us make all manner of changes or improvements possible. The checkpoints are missing. Our interaction with time movement is different. It passes like “being in the zone” or perhaps like standing midstream in an ever-changing flow of water. Motion. Life is in real-time and un-captured.
• Living in the future or past (as I have been trained to do) is like staring off at fixed but ultimately untouchable points. Triangulation.
I mainly live in the “trigonometry of time”. Do you?
Certain cultures actually have no form of future tense.
(Did you absorb that?)
For them, there is no language or solid way to truly express or encapsulate something ahead of this very moment.
BOOM. That’s crazy different.
Sicilian and ancient Hebrew are just two examples.
Now brace yourself. If you haven’t guessed already…
Yes, that means anytime you hear the words “shall” or “will” in Jewish/Christian scripture you are hearing the imposition of your own cultural and linguistic bias placed onto the original text and meaning.
(Thinking of the implications could just blow your mind, right? Now, go ahead, open your Bible and find a few misleading verses and re-understand them.)
Note: New Testament Scripture was written in (ancient) Greek and does contain a future tense. It was however based on beliefs and texts of people who did not have a native reference to an equivalent future tense option nor the applied meaning future tense indicates, necessarily or at all.
Binary vs. the not yet
Often in equatorial geographic regions, there literally is no way to really say “I will work.” Instead it’s “I work.” Binary. Sometimes inflection is used to draw a sort of distinction or a qualifier, like referring to a (future) month or day. That’s a watered down communicative incident compared to the full use of future tense we take for granted in English, and the closest language to English: German.
The language difference has even been studied scientifically to see if things like breaking habits (like smoking), or the activity of saving or spending money, or gaining weight are different because of language. Click the link to see the results.
What are some of your thoughts on the passage of time, future tense, or living right now?
Whew. Ice pack for my brain, please.
IF this post was interesting, please like or share it…now. (In real time.) :)