Productination

My wheels rolled smoothly on the parking structure floor. After hours, it was an absolute pleasure to skate here. The asphalt knew not the wear and tear of the rest of the city, and its surface felt almost polished in comparison.

I usually started my day off with a nice downhill slalom from my car to the bottom of the structure. It was the perfect way to kick off my work day, lingering on the last few moments before heading into the office, focusing my mind and allowing me a little extra time to put on my game face. Similarly, after an eight hour day of putting out fires and solving arcane, illogical puzzles, I tried to get in a few minutes more on the roof before heading home, if I wasn’t completely exhausted.

The air tonight was cold and moist and wonderful, and the city just oozed gorgeousness.

As should be pretty obvious by now, at its core, my story is no more complicated than one about a guy who skateboards, writes code, takes pictures, writes stories, sometimes talks to girls, and occasionally trolls the intermawebs. Certainly, I have my fair share of wild and crazy adventures, but some days are just the basics, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I pride myself on being able to enjoy even the most mundane tasks. Even moments in my life most people would label unpleasant or painful are beautiful in their own right.

Every moment is perfect, just the way it is.

After skating around the rooftop, taking in the night, I drove home, had a hot meal, read for a while, and went to sleep.

Most people don’t know the myth of Sisyphus and have heard only of his punishment.

When Sisyphus heard that Esopus’s daughter was kidnapped by Jupiter, he offered to give Esopus this information, in exchange for a gift of water to his Citadel. He knew that withholding this information for a ransom would earn him grief in the underworld, but willingly traded punishment in the afterlife for earthly pleasures.

He managed to trick Thanatos, the god of death, to chain himself up, thus preventing any human from dying. When Thanatos was eventually released, his first victim was Sisyphus, but before dying, Sisyphus had told his wife to pitch his body into the town square. Once in the underworld, he pleaded to Persephone that he was not afforded proper burial rites, begging for a chance to correct this. Persephone kindly sent him back to the realm of the living.

It was not until he had reached a ripe old age that he was dragged back to the underworld and sentenced to serve his eternal penance.

According to some, Sisyphus was an evil, cunning, trickster and troublemaker. According to Camus, though, he was an absurdist hero, punished because he scorned the gods and cherished life. In his interpretation, Sisyphus is conscious of the futility of his eternal toil, and upon fully accepting it, actually appreciates it.

He imagines Sisyphus happy.

I had spent the entire day working furiously, but making no progress. Every time I put out one fire, newer, more interesting fires sprang up all around me.

It had been weeks since I saw the bottom of my inbox; the mountain on top seemingly pullulating. I knew it was possible to conquer the pile and get ahead, I had done it in the past, but I inevitably let myself slip.

It didn’t take much slippage before I found myself plummeting down the spiral of nega-productivity.

Alas, such is the curse of the eternally urgent. When constantly tasked with putting out fires instead of working on secondary goals or structural changes that make life easier in the long run, those things never get done, and I set myself up for more disasters down the line.

Even so, at the moment there were fires to put out, so I accepted my fate and zestfully charged forward.

I came home from a long day of work and school and plopped down into my computer chair. My email ticker scrolled across the upper right corner of the screen, and I noticed that I had one new message. It was from my roommate.

Hey Keenahn,

We were wondering when finals end for you?

We are inquiring because our lease is up and we have a friend that wants to move in, and we’d like to resign with him.

However, we don’t want to stress you out during finals or anything, and we want to make sure you would have enough time to make arrangements.

We’re happy to give you more than 30 days, so that you can have a smooth transition and the ability to find a different place down here if you need to.

He wants to move in around May 15, is that enough time?

Sincerely, The Roommates

Like a punch in the guts, a feeling of sadness hit me. “This is about me not cleaning the dishes, isn’t it?” I thought to myself. Or “this is because I didn’t fully take care of the bug problem, huh?”

I mean, shit. I bought two kinds of roach traps, what else was I supposed to do?!

I sulked for a few minutes, feeling like a shitty roommate, and that this is what I deserved.

I read the email again.

“we have a friend…” and “we don’t want to stress…” and “We’re happy to give you more than 30 days…” My roommates were actually being quite accommodating. And, it’s entirely possible that they did have a friend. I had only known them for about 6 months.

This was totally understandable and most likely not about me at all.

So now that I was no longer taking it as a judgment on me, now what? “Crap.” I thought to myself “I’m going to have to find a new place to live.”

An awesome computer graveyard I found.

It gnawed at me subconsciously for a week, “Would I be homeless?” I thought to myself, and “How am I going to tell my parents?”

Since moving out of my parents’ house about five years ago, I have lived in eight different apartments and houses. I was no stranger to finding housing and making arrangements to move. This was no different.

And so, I got to work. I created a form email and blasted responses to every craigslist housing ad that remotely sounded livable. In one night, I sent out over thirty emails.

The next day, calls and emails started trickling in. I set appointments, printed my map, and got to drivin’.

I looked at five apartments, each of which had one thing I didn’t like about it. The sixth was no exception. It was perfect, except for the price. If I decided to sign the lease for it, it’d be the most I’ve ever paid for rent in my short life. Other than that, it was awesome. The location was amazing, my room was nice and big, and I had a living room and balcony that just screamed party.

And so, I pulled the trigger and signed, telling myself I’d figure out how best to pay for it later. I was in no danger of being homeless or missing rent, but I had to get a little creative with some tight budgeting regarding my “baller” lifestyle.

I rented the truck, got a little help from my friends, and moved in. I’m very happy with it, the happiest I’ve ever been with a domicile.

Some nice houses in the Haight, San Francisco.

This experience reinforced for me a belief I hold dear to my heart: Opportunities are everywhere. And as a corollary: where opportunities do not exist, we can create them.

Even as I write about the experience, I’m drawn very strongly to frame it as a positive thing. I originally wrote “this was an opportunity for me to practice seeing things as opportunities,” but I struck that line, thinking that I use the word “opportunity” too much.

It could have gone down very differently. If this happened to me a few years ago, I might have done any of the following:

1. Panicked, taken the fetal position, and called my parents for help
2. Gotten sad, sulked, then went to step 1
3. Gotten sad, and then begrudgingly and painfully looked for new lodgings
4. Pretended everything was OK, did nothing, and then found myself faced with a very abrupt reality check

None of those options sound as much fun as what I actually did, which was to view this as a great chance for me to upgrade my living space. When I opened up craigslist, I was actually excited.

The universe was my catalog.

But you’re probably asking yourself, dear reader, how can I get this way? How can I prevent myself from falling into one of the traps outlined above?

Initially, it took me a metric fuckton of conscious effort to go against my default behaviors, learned after years of reinforcement, to be negative and judgmental.

Negative thoughts only have as much power as you give them, and we give them the most power when we’re unaware of them. By ignoring them or denying them, they just grow and continue to run the show subconsciously.

And so, over the past couple years, I realized that, hey, I have a lot of negative thoughts, and they aren’t that fun. So I decided I would try to catch myself. And I did. A lot.

I’d find myself hating my current situation, or wishing that things were somehow different, all the while not embracing the state of the world as it was. When I noticed myself going in of these downward spirals, I acknowledged that I was doing it, then consciously chose to stop.

I want to be absolutely clear on the last part, because it is easy to misunderstand. When I was unaware of my negative thoughts, I let them affect me subconsciously. Every one of my conscious actions was framed and colored by this negativity. Once I became aware of these thoughts, I was able to stop them. Also, let me be clear that these thoughts are not necessarily bad. I’m not saying, pretend to be happy all the time. No. Sadness, anger, guilt, shame, these are all part of the diverse palette of human emotions. In fact, it is when we deny ourselves from feeling these emotions that they really grab the reins.

When I would stop myself from getting stuck in a loop of negativity, positivity naturally flowed forth. I started seeing positive aspects of every situation. I started seeing challenges as opportunities for growth, and my life has greatly improved because of it.

And so, dear reader, I ask you, do you ever find yourself in a feedback loop of negativity? Do you ever find yourself unhappy with the state of the world, but not really doing anything about it? For the next week, just pay attention and try to catch yourself when these thoughts come up. Think about how you can turn whatever you’re unhappy about into an opportunity.

The Starbucks on 19th Avenue and Irving, San Francisco

A few days after moving in, I locked myself out of my apartment. I had no cell phone, no car keys. I had left the house with just my skateboard, my moleskine, a pen, and my money clip. I said to myself “Awesome!” (people who hang out with me know that I do this a lot), and started skating around the neighborhood. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like leaving my keys on my desk ruin my day. I saw this as a chance to explore! I ended up at happy hour at this really cool sushi restaurant across the street. I sat at the bar, chatted with some people, had some edamame, some sake, and a lot of decent (and cheap) sushi, and left feeling completely satisfied.

I skated back to my apartment and noticed that my roommate still wasn’t home. “Excellente!” I said, as I skated towards my local coffee shop. I tried a piece of cake I hadn’t tried before, got some coffee, and started writing in my moleskine. I listened in on a writing group that happened to be meeting there at the table next to me, and got a really cool idea for a group writing project with my friend.

All of these discoveries were made possible by forgetting my keys.

Hope you found that useful. I had fun writing it. As always, leave me some comments, and let me know if this impacted you!

See you next week.

It was a bright Wednesday morning; the sun sliced through the slats of my track blinds and bounced off my retinas. I felt my bed shaking and I realized, my phone was going off. I had set an alarm the previous night and then stuffed my phone between my mattress and my boxspring.

It was time to get up.

I groggily dragged myself to my computer, I had six new messages waiting for me, four were spam and two were facebook notifications. Awesome. I told myself that I’d deal with those later.

I woke up early for a purpose.

I carefully measured out three scoops of beans and watched in slow motion as they tumbled into the mill. I pulsed the grinder, making sure to muffle the sound in my sweatshirt, and flipped on my percolator. Even the most mundane things I do have a cinematic quality to them.

Caffeine coursed through my arteries as I zoomed through my textbook, its numerous appendices, and some diagrams online, reading just enough to understand my homework problems and complete them. My homework was due on Monday, and I was going to turn it in late for partial credit.

Time was running out, and I skipped the longer, more involved problems.

Feeling resigned to my “good enough” attempt at the homework, I printed it out and jumped in the shower. The warm water rushed over my body and I got lost in my thoughts. Five minutes turned into ten turned into twenty, when I realized “Oh shit! I have to get to school!”

I ran out, threw on some clothes, grabbed my homework and my skateboard and bolted out the door.

My dashboard clock said 10:55. I knew that my professor collected homework during the break at 11:00. Would I make it? Would my work, as half assed as it was, be in vain?

I flew down Wilshire, took a left on Westwood, and pulled into self parking. I paid the two dollars for forty minutes of parking, and sped off towards the engineering building on my skateboard.

I pushed open the door to my classroom and saw that everyone had come back from break. The hall clock said 11:08. I had missed the deadline by a few minutes.

There went 1% of my grade.

Gahh! I crumpled my homework up and wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, I started playing with my phone, distracting myself. I played with my phone quite often. My friend B wanted to meet for lunch. Awesome, but I had other plans that day. I wanted to get my hair cut, so I told him no and then started skating towards my car.

Driving west on Wilshire, my frustration, sadness, and anger with myself finally bubbled over. I was tired and hungry, and could no longer exert the effort it required to block those feelings out. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE!” as I pounded the steering wheel. I started to cry. My vision blurred and my eyes stung as crying turned into sobbing.

I was catharting, and when it was done, I felt like a great weight had been lifted.

What did I learn from this?

For the past two years (even before I started going to grad school) a question that people had for me over and over again was “Why are you going to grad school?” I had a laundry list of logical reasons, so let’s just get those out of the way:

1. It will help me make money in the future.
2. I would gain some prestige having a higher degree.
3. I would learn a lot and become more specialized.
4. It’ll be awesome to live in LA for two years.
5. Going to school is more fun than working full time.
6. I had already invested the effort in getting in, so might as well follow through.

Those all sound pretty good, and I was somewhat convincing when I told people. There were a few other reasons that I didn’t really tell people, like that it was expected of me, and that it would please my mom.

But, even so, other people kept asking me, and I was unable to keep convincing myself that all of those reasons were true. I didn’t really believe them all, and at the root of it, there was some feeling that I didn’t want to feel.

Looking back, it’s perfectly clear that the feeling I was blocking out was what came out during my catharsis, the feeling of not wanting to go to grad school. Well, guess what? Trying to deny your feelings works great, if you want those feelings to fester and grow in intensity.

This feeling was running the show subconsciously, and I had no idea. Being five minutes late is a perfect illustration of how I would sabotage myself.

Subconsciously, I wanted to fail out.

Once I finally fully owned that feeling, instead of denying it or trying to block it out, I was able to let it go and move on. That feeling will no longer fun me. When it comes up again, I can acknowledge it, get in touch with my true values, and move forward. I’ve decided that yes, I truly do want to finish my degree, that this aligns with my core values, and I am 100% OK with the fact that I may not want to be at grad school sometimes.

It’s a wonderful thing to finally wake up from sleepwalking.

So, dear reader, we are all run by our subconscious to different degrees. What have I been doing that finally allowed me to have this epiphany? Well, it’s been several practices:

1. Meditation and other practices to just gain greater awareness of my body.
2. Physical activities to cultivate greater capacity for intense feelings.
3. Purposely putting myself in uncomfortable situations so that I can practice feeling those things I don’t want to feel, and being OK with it.
4. Hanging out with supportive people who will call me out on my bullshit and give me reflections of where I’ not being true to myself.

It was fully two years that I was denying that feeling. Everyone around me could see it and could tell that something was off and I didn’t listen. It took an intense experience to break me out of my trip and show me that the cost of denying that feeling outweighed the cost of feeling it.

For the next week, I want you to practice noticing any resistance you have to feeling your emotions. Just noticing this resistance would be good in and of itself, but if you’re up for it, keep going and constantly ask yourself, “What is it I don’t want to feel?” If you follow that rabbit hole deep enough, I assure you, you will have a lot more freedom in your life.

Hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. See you next week!

Greetings cyberland,

Sitting here in my boxers with the lights out, my backlit keyboard and LCD the only illumination in the room, I’m codin’ code and drinkin’ drinks. My eyes are royally strained, and I am tired as fuck, hunched over in my hard plastic chair. But, just a few minutes ago I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude and appreciation. It’s hard to put to words the intellectual content of that moment, but I just realized that truly, there is nothing else in this world I’d rather be doing, and there is no other person I’d rather be.

It wasn’t the act of coding or sitting here either, or anything connected to my actions. In fact, there are a lot of things that are more fun or pleasurable than what I’m doing right now. Nor do I think I’m a perfect person, I know I am far from it. I can see all the fun I could be having, I can see all the areas of myself that I want to improve, and I’m still rock-solid OK with what I’m doing and who I am right now.

For me, this feeling used to be incredibly rare. I used to plague myself constantly by wishing I was doing something better, worrying I was missing out, or wanting to be someone other than me. This would manifest itself as getting bored waiting in line, getting angry at traffic or the weather, or totally beating myself up for staying in on a Saturday night. It wasn’t until after a lot of work on myself that I was even able to see that I was doing these things, and then later still that I allowed myself to appreciate my life just the way it is. The good news is, I’m feeling it more and more often, and I am glad. Like all sensations, however, I know that this too will pass, and I’ll probably shortly find myself checking out and perhaps not appreciating my life again.

Appreciating my life the way it is does not mean I’m complacent or apathetic. Just the opposite in fact. I am quite ambitious when it comes to working on myself and my life, but the thing is that I can totally enjoy the process. My goal is to be able to appreciate my life 100% of the time. I know this is lofty, but I think I can do it. And if I don’t, I won’t beat myself up about that either.

I can appreciate that sometimes, I won’t be appreciating.

When I went on a 10 day meditation retreat, the facilitators really stressed that the path to enlightenment is long and hard, and that it is nigh impossible for a “householder” (that is, someone who has a job and obligations other than attaining enlightenment) to become a Buddha in one lifetime. I don’t believe in reincarnation. I also don’t really want to give up being a householder, so I may never reach enlightenment. That’s OK with me. What I know for sure is, I have this lifetime to live, and I want to spend it as freely as possible. Being completely OK with feeling both “negative” and “positive” sensations gives me more freedom to act instead of going on tilt whenever something confronting comes up.

And so, what have I been doing? How am I able to appreciate my life so much more frequently now? Well, it’s been a combination of things:

1. Doing more stuff I really love. A lot of people I know don’t even appreciate the good things in their lives, let alone the not so good things. It is pretty easy for me to appreciate things that are fun and pleasurable but hey, everyone has to start somewhere. The only danger in this is that I could have easily become attached to these “good” activities and the feelings associated with them, which would just make me more miserable when I’m not doing them. So, I was careful to remind myself, “Yes, this is fucking awesome. But this too shall pass…”
2. Putting myself in challenging situations on purpose and practicing staying composed. This has taken the form of approaching girls who look really cold or unfriendly, having those “confronting” conversations I’ve been putting off for a long while, and just generally doing things that scare me, while practicing being OK with whatever feelings come up. Training myself to remain composed in tough situations allows me more room when these types of situations naturally arise.
3. Seeing opportunities in challenges. This is more of a mindset shift than any sort of behavior change, but basically, whenever I encounter difficulty in life, I try to step back and see what I can learn from it. An example: I walked into work two weeks ago and my boss handed me an assignment, saying that we needed to get it out the door that day. He had never given me such a short deadline to do something this big. So, as I’ve been doing a lot lately, I said “Awesome!” and got to work. Instead of getting stressed out (my boss seemed kinda tense), I saw it as an opportunity to prove my chops. I knew that I could do it, and I also knew that I wouldn’t beat myself up if I couldn’t. And so, I finished with minutes to spare. This hints at another important topic I’ll write about more later, which is that belief influences reality.
4. Meditating. The type of meditation I practice focuses on
   1. Becoming hyper aware of my body sensations
   2. Remaining equanimous to all of them

   I don’t practice it nearly as much as I would like to, but even just the retreat gave me so many lasting benefits. I will post a full review of the retreat in the future.

An old friend recently told me that she pretty much stopped feeling regret or beating herself up for mistakes she made in the past. I told her that I think that’s wonderful and asked her how she arrived at her breakthrough. She told me that after years of running through her old habit pattern, she finally realized that being run by these feelings was simply not profitable. It cost her a lot of time and energy that she now spends on more valuable things.

What are some things in your life that are easy for you to appreciate? What are some things in your life that might not be so positive that you can still appreciate? As homework, I want you to practice appreciating one new thing about your life every day.

Let me know how it goes.