If you’re interested in baseball — especially pitching — this is a terrific discussion between “Pitching Ninja” Rob Friedman and Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux.
In a personal note, back in the day I had an opportunity that would have allowed me to pitch with Greg’s brother Mike Maddux, but my shoulder wouldn’t hold up.
When I was younger I didn’t really like The Beatles, though I did like individual songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of McCartney and The Beatles, and this quote from the Wikipedia’s A Day in the Life discussion is good:
“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on ‘A Day in the Life’ that was a real ... The way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn’t let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else’s stuff, you experiment a bit. So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said ‘Should we do this?’; ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”
(Here’s a link to A Day in the Life on YouTube.)
(Dear Jackie Waller: Sorry, you were right, I would have liked the Beatles if I took the time to listen to them.)
As a brief note, here are my favorite songs of late:
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
If only ... I had a little bit more time
If only ... I had a little bit more time with you
I fell down, down, down
Into this dark and lonely hole
There was no one there to care about me anymore
And I needed a way to climb and grab a hold of the edge
You were sitting there holding a rope
...
And maybe someday I’ll see you again
We’ll float up in the clouds and we’ll never see the end
A poem from the tv series Monk:
“Hold me, Adrian,
my darling husband.
True love’s touch is so rare a gift.
How much more precious is your caress
who loves so deeply,
yet fears the warmth,
of hand on hand.
Still your love is given free,
only to me,
only to me.”
~ Trudy Monk
I started watching Dawson’s Creek recently because I was curious what Joshua Jackson was like before Fringe, and I have to say — I know their conversations are intentionally verbose — but even in the short talks between Dawson and his parents, my relationship with my parents was nothing like that. We never talked about things because my mom was very sick and my dad was very domineering and abusive. So I watch this show and wonder, is that what parental relationships are really like in a healthy household?
I’ve always used some sort of Kanban technique in my brain, long before I knew the formal meaning of a Kanban board or Kanban process. But in the last few years I started using a whiteboard as my Kanban board, and I really like it. It makes me more organized and productive, and I feel like the productive part is because it makes work and progress visible. In my entire computer programming career I have always liked the term, “make work visible,” and Kanban and Scrum are the epitome of that.
Rocky Balboa, talking to his son:
“And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
I enjoyed this quote from Rocky Balboa the first time I saw the movie, and I appreciate it even more now after getting my a** kicked by this f-ing blood disease, but still grinding along every day.
Imagine being 30 years old, and life is good. You’re healthy, vibrant, and even astonishingly good at math.
But then just a few moments later you can’t make sense of the world. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not.
You begin hearing voices that aren’t there. Maybe you see things that aren’t there.
Shortly after this you’re put into a “mental institution.”
That’s what happened to my mom. For whatever reason, shortly after I was born, she was stricken with schizophrenia.
(If you’ve ever seen the tv series Fringe, my mom is almost exactly like Walter Bishop, or vice-versa.)
A few people I’ve talked to recently who have (or had) cancer told me they can clearly remember the moment when their doctor told them that they had cancer.
In my case I do remember the conversation with the doctor, but that was more of a formality. When I picked up the phone to talk to her, I already had a pad of paper and a pencil in hand, and I was ready to write down the details she was going to tell me. Because in my case I was pretty certain that I had cancer when I saw the ultrasound results a few days earlier.
As I continue my quest to learn about Ram Dass and Maya (illusion), I also had a very hard time finding any quotes about Maharaj-ji and Maya, and after sifting through about 1,000 pages of books I finally found this Maharaj-ji quote:
“All is God’s will, but Maya prevents you from knowing it’s all God’s will.”
If you’re interested in this, you can find this quote and a little bit more on page 326 of the book, Miracle of Love.
October, 2022 Update: I also just found the following quotes in an out-of-print book about Maharaj-ji:
In that first quote the “(illusion)” part was in the book, I didn’t add that.
I was just looking around for a Ram Dass quote about Maya and couldn’t find anything great, but then I found this YouTube video where he talks about Maya and illusion:
“There’s a philosophy in India where the outside world, the world of things, all is illusion. And that’s a way to deal with the sense world ... to get free of it, and go inward, and go into the Atman, the God within.”
In this Entering the Stream article, he also states the following:
“Beings who have understood how it all is, who have realized their identity with the ātman, are stream enterers; they have tasted the flow of the nectar of liberation. They are a breed apart from other people in the world. They know something others do not know. Every part of their life is colored by that merging.
A free being no longer identifies with the body or personality, with a personal past or future. The body, the packaging, still has its karma running off and the skandhas, the mental aggregates, continue, but with nobody in them.”
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WARNING: Chest pain may be a serious life or death matter. If you’re experiencing chest pain right now, don’t waste any time reading this article — get yourself to a hospital.
On Sunday, November 3, 2019, I had just finished lunch, looked at the clock, and saw that I could fit in about an hour of work before the Denver Broncos game started. Despite Denver’s 2-6 record, I was looking forward to see how Broncos’ quarterback Brandon Allen would do in his first career start following Joe Flacco’s neck injury.
A minute later I had severe chest pain. The pain wasn’t in the middle of my chest, but it was on the left side of the left chest/breast area. To the best of my memory, I went from feeling perfectly fine to having severe pain in a matter of moments; there was no other warning.
I went to the ER one day late last year with severe chest pain. I exercise a lot and had been eating well, so I didn’t think I was having a heart attack, but the pain just kept getting worse, so off I went.
“When there is no attachment to the past and no expectation of the future, there is only this moment — the eternal present, here and now.”
~ Ram Dass, in be love now
I am without form, without limit
Beyond space, beyond time
I am in everything, everything is in me
I am the bliss of the universe
Everywhere am I.
~ Ram Kir
A friend of mine was a devout yoga practitioner, and even studied under B.K.S. Iyengar. Right before she passed away, she began to cry tears of joy, and said, “All is one, all is one.”
(This is a recounting of a dream from October 1, 2016.)
We were playing at our camp when my older brother — who was standing on higher ground than I — saw something in the distance. He stood upright, then perfectly still. After a few moments he turned to me in a look of panic I had never seen before, pointed in a direction opposite from where he was looking, and screamed, “Run! Run!” I was startled at his behavior but I knew that something was very wrong, so I ran. And I ran.
I ran as fast as I could, weaving through the brush and constantly changing my course as I was chased by a white man on a dark horse. I thought I might be close to safety when I darted through some bushes, but I ran right into a creek that was too wide to jump across. As I paused for a moment to decide how to continue, the white man shot me in the back.
In intense pain and sudden shock, I stumbled forward into the creek, bent over with one hand in the creek. As I attempted to stand up and regain my balance, I was shot in the back again. This time my body flew forward towards the opposite side of the creek. I tried to control my fall but could not, and my torso slammed against the land. The right side of my face was pressed against the ground, my eyes still open. My right arm was trapped under my body, my left arm was somewhere down my left side. My legs lay in the creek’s water.
“Long, uninterrupted, alert practice is the firm foundation for restraining the fluctuations of the consciousness.”
~ Patanjali (via Iyengar)
Here are two favorite quotes from Anandamayi Ma. I think almost all of this comes via Ram Dass, but at the moment I can’t remember what book I saw this in. So I assume that Ram Dass or one of his assistants spoke, wrote, or compiled almost all of the following, and I’ll link to one of his books once I can confirm this.
