Morning meditation two days in a row after nearly a year and a half without. This morning my feet didn’t fall asleep as I sat cross-legged on the cushion, but I did find myself somehow less focused than I was yesterday. If opening my eyes to look at the timer is any indication of a wavering focus: I opened my eyes to look about three times. But still, it felt good, essential even, do be meditating again.
Another bicycle ride in the mild January cold–but this time I had gloves on. I was more comfortable, but the ride was more difficult, more difficult than I would expect. And it’s odd that, in the same way that my second day of meditation was more challenging, that the second day of bicycling also felt harder. This may go on for awhile until my mind and my body get stronger.
On the first day without alcohol in this dry January, I slept like a baby.
Picked my boy up from the first day of school after Winter break, took him for a Subway sandwich and bought the dogs some bones and some sticks and some food. Got home, made my own lunch, and spent some time listening to music my son had just recommended to me, an experimental synth-based progressive math rock band called Strobes, and a solo album by the drummer for Snarky Puppy, Larnell Lewis. My boy has good taste in music–but he prefers the progressive instrumental stuff to the vocal melody stuff I prefer–but there’s lots of cross-over. I don’t know if he’s ever played me something he liked that I didn’t like–except for maybe Death Grips. And he tolerates most of my music–which is nice, and some of my favorites are things that he also loves: Elbow in particular.
Speaking of music, I’ve got a couple of record store gift cards from Christmas burning a whole in my wallet. There’s the new Peter Gabriel album, the new Polyphonic Spree, more records from Elephant Gym and Tricot, and some stuff clearly in the popular music world that are typically outside my wheelhouse, but for which I am nevertheless super interested in: Taylor Swift’s pandemic albums and Beyoncé’s latest. Maybe tomorrow I can make up my mind. Today, I could not.
I took a nap.
And I read some more in Ross Gay’s The Book of (More) Delights. This little volume was a Christmas gift from some very dear friends. They supposed (but did not know for sure) that I had already read Gay’s first volume, so they got me the second. I’ve read neither, but because these are essays, and not part one and part two of a narrative, fiction or otherwise, starting with the second book in the series does not appear to be a problem. From what I gather early on, these books are collections of short essays written over the course of a single year that simply set out to describe things that Ross Gay has found delightful or feels a great sense of gratitude towards, things that may or may not be obviously delightful or worthy of gratitude on the surface–so, there is an element of surprise, I think, when the author writes a rather joyous reflection on something that might have been kind of terrible to experience, like being fired from a shitty job, or attempting a birthday hike he realizes he is woefully unprepared for. But other essays here are kind of what you’d expect in a collection about delightful things, small unaccountable and personal joys–his best friend’s 50th birthday, the discovery of a walking-stick lending library in the woods of Vermont, the perfect notebook, the perfect spoon, or cup, free stuff (or shit, depending), cats and dogs in the neighborhood, you get the picture. The writing here is lively, funny, full of reverence and joy for the everyday. No structural secret sauce–these essays are arranged chronologically in the order they were written–so the book has a kind of diary effect–but not in the sense of a recording of what happened–but what might have been most interesting to him or most delightful on any given day.
Gay wrote all of these essays by hand in a notebook, he says in his introduction, and it makes me think about notebooks. Over the decades I have written in and collected tons of them, none of which I can bare to toss out. As a beginning teacher I hand-wrote my lesson plans–and this went on for years and years until a computer was available to me in my classroom. I wrote by hand incessantly and voluminously. As I grew older and more dependent on the technology for efficiency and practicality, I wrote less and less inside physical notebooks until my handwriting completely went to shit. I can barely write by hand now and afterwards I can barely read what I have written. But there is a notebook lover within me still and I still always have one, even if it takes me three years to fill it up. The first entry in my current MOLE notebook is dated July, 2019 and today the notebook is only a little more than half way full. It will be almost five years before I fill up this baby. I don’t like that. Maybe as part of my new meditative practice I will learn to be all right when things slow down a bit. Maybe I will forgive myself the shitty penmanship and hand cramps and allow myself to write by hand more often. It’s a worthy goal, I think. I know there are benefits to writing by hand, not the least of which is simply that it would be kind of embarrassing to have forgotten how. It’d be like getting on a bicycle one day and just falling over, again and again.
michael jarmer 
Hand cramps! Ugh!