Category Archives: Personal History

I forgot to meditate today

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Thus ending a streak of 2,288 consecutive days on the cushion. More than 6 years without a miss. My best guess of when I started meditating would be May of 2008 so I’ve been at it for about 16 years and started tracking my practice (in a spreadsheet) in 2014. Back in 2015 I missed a day because I was sick with pneumonia and the following year I missed because I was attending my 50th high school class reunion.

How did I forget to meditate today? Not sure. Just got busy. Woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that my string was broken. How do I feel about this lapse? Sad wouldn’t be the right word. Maybe a little disappointed? I’m going with nostalgic. And a little relief that whatever pressure came with such a streak is gone. Perhaps I was sitting every day so I could make that spreadsheet entry rather than simply practicing awareness.

Like the man said, the only day that counts is today.

PS: Going forward I will not be tracking consecutive days of meditation practice. Rather, the total number of days practiced since I began tracking in 2014. [3,683]

PPS: This seems like a good time to retire the spreadsheet as well. I’m now logging my daily sessions in Calendar on my MacBook.

Snore

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The company I worked for (28 years) held a managers retreat every year. The boss would take half a dozen of us to some nice resort for three or four days. One year, probably 20 or 30 years ago, the retreat was held at a very nice, almost swanky, resort in New Mexico or Arizona one of the rectangular states. The rooms were expensive enough the boss asked us to share rooms and I was paired up with our chief financial officer. 

Not long after the lights went out my roommate started snoring more loudly than I have ever heard a human being snore. After half an hour or so, I got up and went down to the lobby with the intention of sleeping in one of the nice chairs. However, the night clerk politely explained that was against resort policy. I asked if there were other rooms available and he assured me they were booked up. 

In desperation, I asked him to accompany me to our room. When we reached our floor and started walking down the hall, we got about halfway to the room when the night clerk stopped, tilted his head to the side, listening. He looked at me and asked, “Is that…?” Half a hallway away he could hear my roommate snoring through the closed door.

I followed him back to the lobby, and he was kind enough to find a room for me.

Saturday Night at the Movies

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While endlessly scrolling through the hundreds (thousands?) of movie titles in Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, and all the other streaming services, I flashed back to my youth (‘50s and ‘60s) when watching a movie on TV was a rare treat. Following from Wikipedia:

NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first TV show to broadcast relatively recent feature films from major studios. The series premiered on September 23, 1961, and ran until October 1978, spawning many imitators. Previously, television stations had been only been able to show older, low-budget, black-and-white films that wouldn’t be shown at movie theaters. In the late 1970s, competition from cable television and home video led to a decline in viewership.

It’s difficult to convey what a treat it was to watch a feature-length movie on network TV. The “late show” usually came on right after the ten o’clock news and ran into the wee hours with lots of commercials. We could never have imagined watching almost any film ever produced. Never mind on-demand streaming to a hand-held device.