9/8/17
i'm thankful that several days this week, i have had a morning at work that makes it seem like i am having a bad day, but by the end of the day, i have felt like my day really wasn't that bad. i'm thankful that though there are a lot of tickets waiting in my inbox for me, i'll hopefully be able to get through them and move on quickly. i'm thankful that this afternoon, i get time to work on an app project i'm excited about. i'm thankful to have thought a lot about how the data model will work and done some preliminary sketches of it that i'll get to actually fabricate today. i'm thankful, as someone who has never been handy, that i get to do this thing that gives me some of the satisfaction of having created a useful object, a machine that helps. i'm thankful that d, who has been having to deal with some really hard things at work, is doing really well at it. i'm thankful that we can talk to each other about our various stresses. i'm thankful that at my company's all hand meeting yesterday, we had a long talk about stress and ways to handle it. i'm thankful that i and several other people shared how antidepressants have changed our lives. i'm thankful that we felt comfortable and not afraid of disclosing that and i'm thankful for other people who disclosed hard things.
i'm thankful for this passage by sven birkerts:
"To pay attention, to attend. To be present, not merely in body — it is an action of the spirit. ‘Attend my words’ means incline your spirit to my words. Heed them. A sentence is a track along which heeding is drawn. A painting is a visual path that looking follows. A musical composition does the same for listening. Art is a summoning of attention. To create it requires the highest directed focus, as does experiencing it"
"To pay attention, to attend. To be present, not merely in body — it is an action of the spirit. ‘Attend my words’ means incline your spirit to my words. Heed them. A sentence is a track along which heeding is drawn. A painting is a visual path that looking follows. A musical composition does the same for listening. Art is a summoning of attention. To create it requires the highest directed focus, as does experiencing it"
and these passages from simone weil which inspired it:
"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his
"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his
attention on something real. It is the same with
the act of love. To know that this man who is
hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do —
that is enough, the rest follows of itself.
The authentic and pure values — truth, beauty
and goodness — in the activity of a human being
are the result of one and the same act, a certain
application of the full attention to the object.
Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by
training the attention, for the possibility of such
an act.
All the other advantages of instruction are
without interest.
Studies and faith. Prayer being only attention in
its pure form and studies being a form of
gymnastics of the attention, each school exercise
should be a refraction of spiritual life. There must
be method in it. A certain way of doing a Latin
prose, a certain way of tackling a problem in
geometry (and pot just any way) make up a system
of gymnastics of the attention calculated to give it
a greater aptitude for prayer.
...
Method for understanding images, symbols, etc.Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them
till the light suddenly dawns."
i'm thankful that i have meditated every day this week so far. i'm thankful that it has been hard the last few days but i have done it. i'm thankful for the place i meditate in this house, which is on a pillow in the corner of my office, above which are two windows. i'm thankful that though i close my eyes so i don't see the light coming in through the windows, i can still, i think, feel the light coming through the windows. i'm thankful for the various tingles and twinges and throbs that the machinery of my body is revealed to be always making when i focus on that rather than thought. i'm thankful that tonight i have band practice, which is something that always makes me feel very alive.
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