empty your inbox

It’s Friday afternoon and my Outlook inbox at work is empty. Much like Master Dogen’s advice to prepare the rice today for tomorrow’s gruel, or Joshu’s advice to wash your bowl, I would recommend this practice whenever possible. I would also advise you empty out your mental inbox each day as well. Start each new day from scratch if you can. Wake up like your bed is on fire goes the Zen wisdom. Become reborn every morning. Don’t hold onto the past if you can help it. I had to yell at my five-year-old son last night because he wouldn’t come to the dinner table. He cried and I felt like an ogre. This morning, he hugged me and said he loved me. I hugged him back. All was forgotten. Don’t hold onto passing emotions and turn them into legends that inform your current behavior. In one hundred years, who will remember the point of your anger? Each day, empty out your physical and mental inbox. Wash your dishes tonight so that tomorrow your bowl will be clean.

waiting for nothing

When I was at Syracuse University, I knew a budding writer named John.  He let me borrow a book called Waiting For Nothing by Tom Kromer. Kromer wrote about the homeless during the Great Depression, desperate for food and shelter. I never gave the book back, and can’t seem to put my hands on it today, but the title alone is evocative of a mood these days. More recently in the New York Times, Tom Friedman wrote that if unemployed people are just sitting around waiting for work, waiting for the jobs to come back, they are essentially waiting for nothing. These days, you can’t just wait and hope that your luck will change. You have to create something new. The landscape has changed forever. But what if what you are creating means nothing to no one? What if the world seems like one giant echo chamber? The Genius Grant isn’t coming, the check’s not in the mail. You might be brilliant, but no one cares. Too many voices in the wilderness right now. Too many blogs. Too many opinions. Too many experts. People are too busy surviving. Sometimes it just might be better to drop out for a while.

save money, live better

You work in a factory that makes t-shirts. Wal-Mart informs your company that unless you can provide your product to them at a cheaper price, they won’t carry your t-shirts in their stores any more. And they’ve also contacted a rival company and told them the same thing. The ensuing battle forces your company to move their production overseas where labor is dirt-cheap, workers have no protection or health insurance, and environmental regulations are never enforced or non-existent. Your factory closes and the only job you can find is a minimum-wage  service job in a video store or a call center. You used to make good money, not an extravagant yearly wage by any means, but at least a wage that allowed you to hold your head high and know that you could responsibly support your family. Now you are trying to support a family on a paycheck that is at or below the poverty line. You come home from the video store , or the fast-food joint, or the call center, and you sit down on the couch to watch a little baseball on TV to unwind before you have to help your wife make dinner, wash dishes, do the laundry, help your kids with their homework, bathe them and put them to bed. You’re tired and frustrated because you don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills or where the next load of groceries will come from. Then a commercial comes on the TV, showing a happy suburban couple. The voice-over says “Save Money. Live Better. Wal-Mart.”

orwellian photo of the day

War is Peace, anyone?