Forgot headphones, watch, and lunch.

SGB, Afternoon

After school on the porch.

7:46 AM, Spring Garden Bridge, Listening to George Saunders on the Interview, created my icebreaker for the morning based on this Chekhov quote:

A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem — it just has to formulate it correctly.

South Street Bridge, 3:55 PM

Start the Week on how the arts impacts health.

On another note, the red light cameras by the art museum are live. That’s good news for pedestrians who’ve grown accustomed to the five to ten cars that blow the light leaving you even less time to get across the street.

But the money goes to the parking authority, which only fuels an already bloated bureaucracy.

And for me, I’m waiting on the pedestrian light to get across Kelly Drive. They installed the electric about a month ago but haven’t set up the lights. This is one of those crosswalks where nobody stops; the kind souls who do invariably run the risk of getting rear-ended or of having someone swerve around them to plow through the crosswalk.

SGB, 7:31 AM (Listening to The Great Gatsby audio book)

South Street Bridge, 3:57 PM. Listening to bad classic rock.

SGB, 7:27AM

What sort of omen is this? To come upon a crow eating a rat when you’re three minutes from work?

Listening to The Daily on vaccines

Have some police boat shots for later.

One of the better shots I’ve gotten.

Listened to Start the Week on The Dark. Photographer Jasper Goodall was on…these photos, from his series, Into the Wild Night, are stunning.

Also listened to Ezra Klein on “what is this?” Stephen Batchelor.

While I don’t love that the NYT has more and more video content, I do appreciate that they continue to publish transcripts. Couple of passages here:

That nonreactivity is really, in classical Buddhist language, nirvana itself.

EK: What’s that like, man? [Laughs.]

SB [Laughs.] It sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps, but it’s something we already all know.

It’s odd — I find that people I know who have no interest in meditating have had experiences where all of their muddled and worried thoughts, for some reason, just die down. People might find this in doing sports, for example — running every day. They might find it by going for hikes in the countryside or just working in their gardens. There are all manner of activities we do that have nothing to do with meditation in a formal sense but are moments whereby, suddenly, we find we are at peace with ourselves. That, to me, is the nonreactive space.

I think it’s dangerous to present it as something exotic and spiritual. I feel nirvana in these moments of stopping, and in that stopping, suddenly feeling at peace with ourselves and in harmony with our world. It may only last a few seconds, maybe longer. But that’s nonreactivity. It’s not something we just get from meditation.

And sometimes they come upon us out of the blue: One day, you sit down on a park bench, and for some reason that you cannot explain, you find yourself still and quiet. The mind’s chatter has died down. And in that moment — and this is the other side of nonreactivity — the world reveals itself more luminously.