Untimely Thoughts Of An Immortalist

I awakened at - 8:47? I think, 8:47. Too late to Uber the morning rush.

It's now 10:50. I have spent most of the past two hours in my office with the blinds pulled and the lights off so that it's dark. Not nighttime dark. In-between, neither-here-nor-there dark.

No TV, no radio. Silent.

I think the ill-defined darkness and the silence have both contributed to me spending most of the past two hours browsing online - for nothing in particular. After spending perhaps half an hour or more trying to recall an article that I read once about luxury cars that can be bought at discount (I don't remember now why I chose to look for that article in the first place), I've Googled random terms that came to mind, ending with a search for electric cars and hybrids.

I have checked the time at intervals, noting its passing, and noting that I am not getting anything done, And I asked myself, "Why am I doing this?"

What type of pleasure am I getting out of this? It's more than the intellectual/cognitive pleasure of learning new stuff. It's like a physical thing, a feeling.

And this word popped into mind: timelessness.

I know that time is passing, but the darkness, the silence, and the very fact of not getting anything done help to create a feeling as if it weren't. It's sort of like Flow, except it's not. Or maybe it's an aberration of Flow, a mal-Flow.

I feel like I could do this - Google in the dark, follow random link after random link - forever.

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Rather, I felt like I could do that forever. But now I'm doing this- writing a blog post: a significant shift in direction of my attention and a heightening of intention. Finishing this, publishing this, matters.

A few minutes ago, part of what I felt was a sense of nothing mattering. I don't mean despair, I mean indifference. A pleasurable indifference arising from the feeling of being disconnected from time. The feeling of timelessness led to feeling as if it did not matter what I did, and that feeling was not painful. It was rather pleasant. Okay, I'll say it - I was comfortably numb.

And it occurred to me that the feeling of timelessness may be a preview of eternity.

As a resurrectionist and an immortalist, I expect to live forever (along with everyone else) in a way that is not limited to this planet. Living forever will mean never running out of time, never experiencing a lack of time. Not being limited to this planet will mean not being bound by the 24-hour day.

I have tried to imagine this. How will we experience time? Or will we experience time at all? Will the concept itself fade away as useless - No time, only life?

And just now the notion came to mind that if time as we know it disappears, nothing that we do will matter.

In respone to which this notion popped up, knocking that one down: in eternity, everything matters.

It suddenly seemed clear to my imagination that the Christian's post-transition life will not be a life in which we need to redeem time, because the days are evil. Nor will it be a life in which we waste time. Rather, it will be a life full of good activity spanning galaxies, and ever-deepening relationships with an ever-increasing number of people, all rooted in intimacy with the Godhead.

It will all matter.

Now, iinteraction with lots of other people would seem to require some means for measuring time. Otherwise, how will I make my appointments with Johann Sebastian Bach for composition lessons (that's on my post-transition bucket list)? But what that means will be, I have no idea.

And given that I have spent 1.5 hours writing this (yikes!), now is not the time to figure that out. I am still largely Here rather than fully There, and here, I am already late for starting an insane day of meetings and tasks. I want to devote more time later to the matter of demonstrating eternal, galaxy-encompassing life within the context of time and space. For now, I'll end with: in eternity, everything matters, so for immortals, everything here matters now.

P.S. - I'm yielding to temptation: this came to mind while writing. Enjoy!

FALLing Forward: A Process For Progress After Failure

Today, +Terry Doloughty stopped by. It was a followup to an earlier visit in which he and some other friends helped me to unload a chiffarobe that I had brought up from Louisville.

The chiffarobe had belonged to my Dad, and after he passed, I told Mom that it was the only thing of his that I wanted. Mom passed in May, and I went down to pick up the chiffarobe in November.

Loading, transporting, and unloading it turned into much more of an adventure than I anticipated or would have dared imagine, partly because it was missing a wheel and when you tried to move it across the floor, it tilted, and pieces that were held together by tongue and groove worked themselves loose and ultimately my friends and I wound up disassembling and reassembling the thing in my office.

After that, I ordered a pair of wheels online. Tonight Terry installed them. The chiffarobe now sits even - as much as it can on a sloping floor.

None of this has anything to do with what this blog post is about, except that the idea for it popped into my head while Terry and I were working with the chiffarobe.

The idea was a two-word phrase: "fall forward." Or rather, "FALL Forward."

You ever have stuff come to your mind so quickly and completely that you don't even feel like you *thought* of it - that it feels like it just arrived?

"FALL forward" did that. Suddenly I saw an acronym for breaking free of a persistent pattern in my life.

The imprisoning pattern is -

1. I mess up in some way: I miss a deadline, I fail to keep a promise. I do or say something that I should not have done or said.  Something.
2. I procrastinate on doing what I could do to fix the situation, partly because I am too busy with #3...
3. I feel bad about the failure. Like, I work at feeling bad about it. I avoid the other person(s) involved, feeling certain that they now hate me. This persists indefinitely until...
4. I reconnect with the other person(s) involved, apologize, and if there is still something to be done, go ahead and do it (those items are not necessarily in that order).

When the phrase "FALL Forward" popped into my head this evening, this was the acronym that it contained for breaking free of that pattern:

1. Forgive yourself. Making this the first step in the process makes it easier to do #2, and thus prevents the endless cycling of #3 above.
2. Ask forgiveness of the other person(s) involved. You don't have to tell the entire story and history of what lay behind the failure/mistake/sin. Just acknowledge it, apologize and do what you can (if anything) to repair the damage.
3. Learn from the experience - intentionally and deliberately. Set aside time, sit down with pen and paper, or keyboard and screen, ask yourself, "What can I learn from this?" and don't stop writing until you feel like you've exhausted the lessons from the experience.
4. Let it go. Really. We all make mistakes or commit sins of varying degrees of severity. Once you've done #s 1-3, rehashing stuff doesn't create additional value for anyone. Let it go. Move forward.

FALL forward.

That's it. I told Terry that I thought it could make a nice short talk, or a booklet, or even a 200-page book for the self-improvement section of the bookstore. All it needs is lots of quotes and anecdotes.

What do you think?

CHEAP THRILLS: The joys of tardiness and procrastination

Source: http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/fro12lc16/2012/10/18/you-say-750-i-say-820/

Yesterday, a friend posted a link on Facebook to a two-year-old blog post from Raptitude.com, titled "Procrastination is not laziness." 

Reading that piece revived the memory of something that I've intended to write about ever since it happened a couple of years ago:

I had an appointment Downtown with a friend at something like 8 a.m. I arrived late, she forgave me, and we had our meeting.

Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was what happened along the way.

As I was preparing to leave, and I saw that I was running late, I became hyper-alert, evaluating every action in terms of whether it would speed up or slow down the process of getting to the appointment, and issuing myself commands like, “Put shirt on before pants so that you don't have to undo pants to tuck in shirt,” and “Stuff tie in pocket and put it on and tie it while in the car, at stop lights.”

That's not the unusual part; that happens often when I'm running late. The unusual part was that this time, for the first time, I realized that I enjoyed it.

A LOT.

In the last minutes before the house and in the car on the way Downtown, I was so aware of both my behavior and my environment, I felt so much in control, I was so decisive, and so just plain smart in judging the outcomes of specific actions, that I was totally jazzed.

All because I was running late.

That realization evoked a couple of questions. First, “Do I tend to run late for appointments because I get such a rush from running late, because I enjoy the hyper-alertness so much?” Second, “Can I learn to experience that hyper-alertness without running late – or more precisely, how can I learn to experience that hyper-alertness without running late?”

The answer to the first question is, “Well, DUH!” It's a cheap thrill.

I consider the second question more useful, and am a bit annoyed with myself for not having thoroughly followed up on it. I really like the guy that sometimes emerges when I'm running late, and want to see a lot more of him, without having to trigger anxiety or to jack up my reputation to do so (avoidable tardiness is rude, after all).

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Missing appointments times is not the only way of running late. One can also run late by missing deadlines for doing things.

And dang it, I've found a way to experience a thrill with that, too.

I'm sorry to say that I learned this – trick? Technique? - I learned of this possibility in fifth or sixth grade. Here's how:

There was some sort of class project with a deadline. A fundraiser, I think. I waited until the last minute to do it, then did a good enough job that my teacher praised me, in front of everybody - not just for doing a good job, but for coming from behind and pulling it off at the last minute.

Which taught me that one way to gain public praise is by pulling things off at the last minute.

Man, I wish I could unlearn that lesson.

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But perhaps I don't need to unlean it; perhaps ignoring it will suffice. It may help if I pay more attention to a different memory, a different type of memory.

I was early once.

Okay, I've been early more than once, but this occasion became special. Again, I had a meeting Downtown, and this time I arrived early enough so that I spent some time sitting in my car, in what was then Kaufmann's parking garage. I don't remember all that I did during that time, but I do remember this.

I loved it.

The absolute lack of anxiety provided its own thrill, one that I want to remember more often, in order to seek it more often.

I think the key to change in this area is not to make myself feel bad about being late – I've tried that a lot, for a long time, and it hasn't worked – but to help myself feel great about being early.

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So here's the dream: not just to be on time, nor just to be early, but to gain a reputation for being early.

What if I was the guy who was already at the meeting place when the other person arrived? How would that feel?

What if, when people came to pick me up, I were waiting on my front porch? How would that feel?

What if someone who met me tomorrow would say a year from now, “I've never known him to be late.”?

Now, THAT would be a thrill!

How do I become that guy? I can start by acknowledging that I already am that guy – he's in me, I just need to let him out more often. At some points in my life, I have already engaged in the specific behaviors needed to be early. I just need to engage in them more often.

But hey, I'm open to suggestions. Have you overcome tardiness and/or procrastination? How? For my neuroscience friends, do you have any brain-based strategies to suggest?