Occasionally, I come back to one of my favorite quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh (from his book “Being Peace”):

“We are so busy we hardly have time look at the people we love, even in our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time–we turn on the TV, or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere. We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act as if we don’t like ourselves and are trying to ESCAPE from ourselves.” (Capitalization is mine)

The crazy thing is, this book was written in 1987, before iPhones, before texting or online chatting, before Facebook or YouTube or Pinterest or any of the other popular “plugged-in” time-sucks that modern technology has given us. Nowadays we can consider picking up the telephone or going for a drive to be great ways to spend our time “un-plugged”, but Thay seemed to be implying that even these activities can take us outside ourselves. To be fair, he would probably also say that going for a drive or talking on the phone would be fine ways to practice mindfulness, so long as when we’re driving, we’re ONLY driving, and when we’re on the phone, we’re ONLY on the phone, and not updating our Facebook status or preparing dinner at the same time.

But the reason this quote originally jumped out at me was because, when I was looking for a book to read, I kept saying to myself (and to people who wanted to help by recommending something…) that I was looking for a book into which I could ESCAPE. When I read TNH’s paragraph that I quoted above, it was like a punch to the brain, and I thought to myself, “So THAT’S why I sometimes feel so agitated.” For whatever reason(s), I sometimes find who and where I am to be unsatisfactory, and I want to escape into something to forget about it. Music, a book, friends, etc. Please don’t think that I’m implying that those things are bad! And I know that Thay wouldn’t say they’re bad either. But when those things are used to simply pass the time or intentionally take us out of who or where we are, they’re supporting a harmful tendency: to escape from what’s going on.

I’ll admit, I sometimes dream about unplugging; turning off my iPhone, not going online, not streaming Netflix… for a day, for a week… fo’ evah. No TV, no text messages, no Words With Friends. When I got a Blackberry for work a few years ago, I thought, “Bah, I don’t to be plugged in all the time,” but then, after a few evenings of being able to get email around the clock without even having to check for it, I began to think, “How did I survive without this?” And when I thought about getting an iPhone, I thought, “Bah, I don’t need something with all that fancy hoobajoop and hizzafuzz,”* but now my brain seems to feel like it can’t survive without carrying my phone around and looking at it countless times during the day. And now I’m plugged in, with information at my fingertips, and I feel both drawn to and appalled by the idea of unplugging.

*OK, I probably didn’t say “hizzafuzz”, but I’m pretty sure I used the word “hoobajoop.”

I bring all this up because today, while sitting, I pondered the subject I discussed in yesterday’s entry: my struggle with feeling like things were better in the past. In the past, say, before I became an acolyte of the Internet? Perhaps, before I uploaded my brain into Apple’s flagship portable device? Now, that’s an oversimplification, but I can’t help but feel that being so plugged in contributes to my sense of there being “good ol’ days” at an earlier time in my life. There are other things that I’m sure contribute to this feeling; the death of my wife, Kate, in 2007, my company closing in late 2011, the economic downturn in 2008, the fact that I got fat in college and can’t run around and kick ass in hockey like I used to, et cetera. I seem to recall life being simpler before these things….

And so there are times in my life that, when I think about them, I get what I call “warm fuzzies.” Some of these moments are recurring, like the first warm days after Winter (that I start grasping for shortly after it gets cold), or Halloween (that I jones for ’round about August), or spending time with my fam around Christmas (for which I develop a hankerin’ in November). But most of the “warm fuzzy moments” are drawn from memories: running around in my parent’s yard as a kid back in the 80’s, working with my dad digging potatoes in the garden, playing street hockey back in the mid-90’s, dating Kate back in ’00, taking my spiritual quest into my own hands and discovering Taoism and Zen in ’01, waking up to my wife for the first time in ’04 (…to name a few). These “fuzzies” are fine memories, but there are times I wish that things could feel that way again, and that desire has a tendency to trap me and take me away from myself, and I wind up looking for ways to escape.

While sitting and looking into this tendency, I remembered two things, and did one thing. First, I remembered that meditation practice doesn’t stop us from reacting to things, but it can help us to stop reacting to our reactions. Feeling a twinge of nostalgia is a reaction. Getting snared by thoughts of the past is a reaction to a reaction. The second thing I remembered was that a big part of awareness is being present with what your body experiences when you spend time with certain thoughts, and this led me to the one thing I did: I decided to “breathe in and breathe out” these different moments and pay attention to what my body did when those thoughts were present.

I breathed in running in my parent’s yard, and I breathed it out.

I breathed in working in the garden with my dad, and I breathed it out.

I breathed in my early days of spiritual exploration, and I breathed them out.

I breathed in that first morning with Kate, and I breathed it out.

What surprised me was this: None of those moments resonated. And I’m using the word “resonate” here to mean: caused a stir or a significant reaction. They felt hollow. Yes, when I thought about those different things, I felt my brain perk up, like a dog hearing its master’s car in the driveway, but the presence of my in- and out-breaths were more “real” than the memories, and so the memories felt comparatively insubstantial.

Having experienced this, I breathed in “the moment where I am right now”, and it resonated. And I thought, “Oh.”

My reactions (and my reactions to the reactions) to my “warm fuzzy” thoughts are coming from where I am NOW, not from where I was THEN, and that’s very important to remember. Those things, as fond as they are, are gone. It’s OK to remember them from time to time and be glad that I got to experience them, but it’s not helpful to start to panic about those memories and feel like I need to get out of where I am now, or try to recapture those positive feelings.

I still feel like I have a long way to go before I calm down some of my reactions to the reactions to my “warm fuzzies”, but it was good to feel the unreality of the past in contrast to the pregnant SUCHness of the present. But for the rest of this morning’s session, I breathed in present moment, and I breathed out the present moment, and it was just fine.