“They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.” – House, M.D.
It’s cool everyone in the world charges their phones with an American Bee. Oh, wait, they call it a USB.
Some things just wear me out faster than the inseam of Oprah’s pants.
Thankfully, some things just make me feel as excited as the Autopsy Club at open Mike night.
Things that wear me out are, thankfully, not so common. Besides, if I listed those, I’d just be whining. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on the positive when I can.
Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:
Learning new things.
The older I get, the more I realize that my ironclad knowledge of youth was . . . wrong.
Not virtue, mind you. What is true and virtuous hasn’t changed. The lessons of morality from my youth from parents and grandparents have been constant guides. So, not that.
But how many things were skipped in history? What’s left to learn in science? Amazing amounts. Heck, I was shocked about some of the things I learned about electricity.
That’s one tough cut of meat.
Writing a post that I like.
When I write a post where I felt that the beginning, middle, and end all work and mesh seamlessly together with the bad jokes and memes? I’m in heaven. I hit the “go” button on the software to schedule the post, and then hit the comments. If it’s a particularly late night, that’s the worst, because I’m excited about what I wrote, but it’s two hours before the alarm goes off.
I took my goldfish to the vet. “He’s having seizures.” The vet responded, “He looks fine to me.” “Sure,” I said, “but wait until I get him out of the bowl.”
It’s worth it even though the two most common synonyms for unemployed are “writer” and “blogger”. One thing to note: some of the posts that I personally like the best aren’t the ones that get the most traction. That’s okay. I’m still learning (see the first point).
Teaching someone something new to them.
When I, with ten minutes and a few hundred words, can change the world view of someone, I cherish that moment. It’s all well and good to go through my daily life just doing my thing, but when I have the opportunity to change the way a human mind works and sees the Universe, forever?
That’s the best. Doing my own thing, I’m limited. The surest way to multiply my impact is to share ideas. I’ll die. If the ideas I taught live on and spread after that?
I still win.
Coming home and sitting down in my chair.
I have a chair upstairs. It’s a nice, soft brown chair, next to a coffee table stacked with too many books. I walk in after a day away, pop my book bag on the floor, and ease down into the chair. From there, I can go anywhere. Most often, The Mrs. will curl up on the couch and we’ll talk about the day. Or if she’s not there? I’ll sit and read. Or sit and sleep. Or . . . whatever.
I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair if she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.
Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house after everyone but me has headed away.
There is something peaceful about sitting in the chair before the chaos of the day begins. I often turn off all of the lights and sit in a still, quiet house, reading about what happened while I slept. I look at my watch and follow the time until it’s time to go.
A crisp autumn day.
Winter is my favorite time of the year because I love the weather, the colder the better. An autumn day is nice, too. The heat of summer has burned off. The potential for a cool autumn day is endless. Work outside? Sure. Open the windows and paint a room? Sure. Weld up the mailbox supports? Can do. An autumn day gives a last look before winter.
Autumn days are filled with infinite possibility. I guess that makes me a Fall Guy. I got that nickname through the school of hard equinox.
One out of our four cats.
We had one cat, and it is an awful cat. Last November, The Mrs. and Pugsley conspired to bring home a second. I was against it. My reasoning was that atheists own more cats than Christians. Pugsley countered that it’s illegal to own Christians.
But about the cat? Sadly, I was wrong. That cat is a pretty good cat. I like it.
The two cats that showed up afterward? I’ll pass, thank you, and they can stay outside unless the apocalypse comes and we need extra flavor for the ramen.
But I like that one cat quite a bit.
I have the reflexes of a cat. Remember, a dead cat is still a cat.
A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.
A few weeks ago it was cool during the week, but hot on the weekend. I grabbed a book around 9AM and started reading. I read through the morning (stopping for lunch) and then read until I took a nap.
That was nice. I hadn’t done it in years. There’s a magic in getting lost in a world, letting it open up in your mind. One boss of mine said that, “Books are the only way that one human can talk to another through time.” He was right. But I make it a point to never read a braille horror book – I can always feel when something is coming.
Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.
The stillness of the house in the morning brings possibility. What will happen next? Who will the next person to walk down the hall be?
My friend kisses his wife goodbye every morning. The Mrs. asked me, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s a good question, but I don’t even know my friend’s wife that well.
As I look through the list, there’s a pattern: I seek new knowledge so I can share it. I look for stillness so I can create thoughts, and then put them into action. While I love taking action and making things happen in the real world, I like to think that the knowledge I pick up along the way and share might make any action I take look, over time, quite small.
What charges you up?
What I do to amp up – coming in to work hours early to read or research my materials I REALLY am interested in at the time. But ever the contrarian, what I do to ‘chillax’ at the end of every day is just important. Losing the routine will result in laying in bed, waiting for fatigue to crash myself out..
I’m a reader, both book and video, so at the end of the day when I have decided to go to bed. I go to the restroom and read at least 10 minutes. I don’t know if its the ‘tired eyes’ (they just sit in their respective sockets for crying out loud) or the mind disengaging to read whatever I read, when I go to bed, it helps relax.
Yup. I found something boring to read right before I go to sleep . . . or when I wake up. Seems to work.
I also enjoy coffee and quiet in the mornings. on weekends I usually am at a dog park throwing endless amounts of balls to my older dog while the younger one tries to steal them (older likes to play “fetch” the younger likes to play “keep away”. I enjoy afternoons reading books too. We should have another one of your blogs suggest books again. I bought most of them and have finished all of them, patiently waiting to see the new Dune movie. Battlefield earth was wonderful, many hours in my chair :).
Done! We’ll (unless other issues pop up) do a book post on Friday.
For me it’s a subset of “teaching someone something new to them” specifically taking someone to the range for first time. The skills imparted are both fun and practical.
Opie Odd
Yeah, this!
Yes. Not the range for me, more the ideas.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that the brain is but a small attic and if you fill it with empty trunks and other debris then there is no room for important things.
To me recharging is to empty first and then refill. Need to make room for the new, for more, or for improvement so first, I need to empty out the trash wasting space in my brain. I do that by working on a complex problem such as repairing a fishing reel or servicing a firearm. Any task that requires concentration and that can last for a few minutes or a few hours works to help me empty the worries about nothing, the fears about nothing, and the thoughts about too many things that I cannot do a thing about. Have you ever tried taking apart an old Penn bait cast fishing reel and not paying attention? Better have spare parts on hand.
I find that at some point in the process of emptying I come across an idea or thought that I decide to explore, so off I go to my library of books of useless information, or my digital library or the interweb to seek details. Learning, or relearning is the best way to restock the mind. As a kid I would open the encyclopedia or dictionary to a random page and begin reading to see how much I knew on that particular page. That would lead me to look up more and the process would end when at some point the outside world came calling.
Once armed with an empty brain and new energy, the world is my oyster, until I get snapped by the shell.
I have a couple of Penn deep sea fishing reels. Yes it does take concentration, especially when the reels are from the 1960s and replacement parts would be scarce as hen’s teeth.
We are fortunate to live on the back corner of a huge subdivision that was carved out of thick woods, So our backyard slopes downward, our grass covering truckloads of fill dirt used long ago to level the subdivision above the flood plane, to a treeline of thick woods full of beautiful tall oaks. In one of which I have put a really tall tire swing for the grandkids. A hundred or so yards back there is the boundary of Redstone Arsenal and a major creek that floods regularly, both preventing chain saws from cutting down those trees and making my backyard view somebody else’s backyard. The flooding, which occurs sporadically after every heavy rain dumps through the entire subdivision storm sewer system into the back portion of my lot, is a small price to pay for having that treeline there continuously. There’s a Corona beer commercial tagline that implores “Find your beach”. Sitting on the back patio, surrounded by flowers my wife has planted and looking at that beautiful tall wall of green, is my beach.
Like you, John, l recharge my mind by continuously learning new things. My latest focus has been bumblebees. They are everywhere lately buzzing among the copious fall flowers of the patio. Coincidentally I recently read they are apparently in danger of extinction and have apparently already vanished from 8 or 9 of the lower Forty Eight States. So this past week I’ve been learning about bumblebees, since we obviously have an (underground?) nest nearby. Very interesting creatures. Their hive only has a few hundred bumblebees instead of thousands of their (deliberately introduced invasive species from Europe) honeybee cousins. Their combs, instead of hexagonal precision, are chaotic lumps that look like clustered mushrooms. With never any excess honey that could be harvested, yet they are prolific key pollinators with exceptionally long tongues.
https://www.xerces.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/12-028_01_XercesSoc_Conserving-Bumble-Bees-Guidelines_web.pdf
And as an aerospace engineer, the fact that it is aerodynamically impossible for them to fly is of course of interesting to me.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8382-secrets-of-bee-flight-revealed/
Long live learning new things as a source of recharging. And long live bumblebees.
Indeed. We need more bumblebees.
I recharge in the gym. My free-weight home gym, cobbled together through decades, and costing enough in total that my bride would faint, should she ever find out how much of our money I’ve spent stocking it. We moved from Noo Yawk to Texas just weeks ago, and hauling all that iron allowed me to buy my own equipment all over again, to the tune of 95 cents per pound for the moving company. They managed to break almost everything else we own, but my Oly plates and bars survive unscathed.
Anyhoo, testing my mettle against the inexorable pull of gravity via those fat 45 pound bumper plates somehow clears my mind better than anything else I know. It is still brutally hot where we (now) are, so the sweat flows freely, carrying out with it all pent-up anger and frustration for the effed-up remains of the world I used to know. The afterglow is sweet, but fleeting, and lo, two days later I must run to the iron for my next fix. My wife calls it an obsession. I call it catharsis.
Yup. In the iron there is Truth.
Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house while reading is one of mine as well. That is almost my definition of peacefulness.
Yes, a time and place where there are no demands. Winter makes it better.
Coffee seems to be recurrent in your post, and in the comments.
A wise person would say: “It’s obvious the enjoyment of an invigorating beverage enhances quiet moments of reflection.”
A Karen would say: “Using a stimulant to enhance your day will cause health problems, and you should abstain from the beverage.”
That’s why Karens should be dipped in ice water every now and then. That, and never allowed to state their opinion.
Ha! I agree. And hold them by the heel when you dip them in. And don’t hold them longer than a dozen or so minutes.
I ride my bicycles (road & gravel) to clear my mind from a hard day at work (when I worked). A ride of 20-30 miles in the wide open spaces and country roads outside of my small city in Southwest Idaho is the best therapy for me. When I worked (retired at the end of August) I used the time out on the bike to solve work related problems. Now I just go out everyday and clear my head from the disturbing news and troubles of the collapsing American Republic I read online every morning with my coffee. No matter how bad things may seem and what ever the future may hold I can come back from a ride refreshed and vitalized. Ready to find out online what else the bastards in Mordor on the Potomac are up to.
I also have a 21 year old road bike set-up as an inside trainer allowing me to clear my head with virtual rides online when weather prohibits going outside. The only problem with that is at 64 years old, I am still pretty competitive and have a nasty habit of trying to stay up with youngsters from around the world that are also using the same app to ride. The up side is I still get to exercise my body and clear my mind for a while. Probably why I am so stupidly optimistic about life, no matter how bad the future may seem.
We have the same problem with cats and dogs in our house, living together MASS HYSTERIA! A male my son brought with him when he moved back home due to a back issue, and then took in a cute little black female cat when her host family received orders to relocated overseas, and the third (a long haired black Persian male about a month old) my son rescued on his was home from work in April 2020. The local pound was closed due to COVID so we were stuck with another cat. Our 11 year old Shiba Inu took the new kitten under her wing and raised him as her puppy, while our Chiweenie wanted to kill him (probably thought he was a rat), and the other cats didn’t want anything to do with the new addition (and still don’t). Now the little fur ball is bigger than all the cats and just under the size of the Shiba. Sometimes it gets a little crazy around here, but the animals really do help relieve stress as well.
I used to ride bikes, but don’t have the time or place anymore. Or, for that matter, the bike. The Boy took mine.
The short answer? The right meds:)
“The short answer? The right meds:)”
Oh! I definitely need some new meds then.
Wine at night . . .
“I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair I she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.”
This poor paragraph ended up crippled in some way. Did you give it the jab during editing, John?
Thank you! Fixed.
I think you are on drugs… first the incoherent sentence and there is the most random flow of your subconscious. I must say a delightful romp and flow through your train of thought…
Hehehe – one day I’ll save a first draft for you . . .
Hahahahaha. And, thank you again.
The chair is Kampfy? Fall is the best and it has been unseasonably warm but finally cooling down after some hard rains.
Books are a construct of the white male capitalist patriarchy and printed on white pages or wayciss!
The shelves are all empty and the hospitals are so quiet you can hear a mouse.
The Brandons are moving quickly and the not so great reset is fundamentally transforming in the egalitarian West Zimbabwe or Chiquitastan.
Fraudci the Sh1t Gollum has more than one vaccine to rule them all…or not?
Coffee is the go go juice without which everything would seize up, an energy drink is OK if there is no time for coffee.
Have you seen the fish that is the Gauleiter (mayor) of Chiraq? Someone keeps tapping the bowl to make its eyes bugout.
None of it is incompetence, it is part of the burn it all down better plan.
It is part of the plan. Keep tapping the bowl.
I picked up a free 1927 Singer treadle sewing machine, still in the cabinet, by the side of the road a couple months back. Works perfectly. I’m learning to sew and plan to make some Amish style pants and shirt for working.
Oh, and then, because I have a mildly obsessive personality, I picked up another (1904) and a 1939 White Rotary electric at an estate sale a block away for $60. And today I’m popping down to a town about a half hour from here to pick up a free 1948 Kenmore that may need some work. So, new hobby apparently.
Also sit quietly in my armchair with my feet on the ottoman, read, and think about the fact that my cats all passed away of old age in the last couple years and how my allergies are better than they were and how there isn’t long white cat hair everywhere (Himalayan Persians) but how I miss them and want them back anyway.
Also thinking about the fact that my old house doesn’t have a lot of rooms and they are small so I have the TV on the wall of the same room where I sit and read. Makes it too easy to set the book down and turn on the tube. Could get rid of the tube but I like watching movies so there’s that.
Yup, when Best Cat is in and being petted, I know I have to wash up, because I’m mildly alergic to her.
*** ? ***
.
“One boss of mind…”
.
One mind of my boss…
A boss’s one mind…
Some random mind, an indivisible part of The One Mind Boss©…
The convivial omnipotent Mind One…
A mind, but not at all a submissive mind…
or
You want a piece of my mind! I will give you a piece of my mind!
or
[ warning — potential ‘ear-worm’ ]
I been a miner for a heart of gold.
D’oh!
That split second of anticipation between the time you click on a word and its definition appears on screen.
Fresh-baked sourdough bread with homemade fig preserves. Or, a perfectly ripe fig, straight off the tree.
Plus all the things you noted.
Mmm, fresh-baked sourdough. Wonderful, especially when the crust is crisp . . .
That’s why Karens should be dipped in ice water every now and then.
–head first, and for at least 3 minutes.
n
Exactly!
Recharge? What is this recharge your are talking about?
I’m always tired lately. The only thing that drags me out of bed in the morning is my dog that needs to go out. She is pretty darn insistent.
The alarm. Oh, how I hate it . . .
thankfully, back in March; getting up at 0430 every morning for work, ended. My “retirement job” working at a ‘home improvement store’ (the one that rhymes with ‘blows’) was over, when they realized they could hire 2 young kids who don’t know anything including showing up for work, for the price of an older guy who knows stuff and shows up everyday. Win-win, right?
That means by force of habit, I’m usually up before sunrise, to spend time on the porch in a comfortable chair, first for prayer and devotions; then making the ‘blog rounds’ of stuff to read. Here’s a pro tip: half a cup of nice dark coffee, with (approximately…) 2 shots of Irish cream… maybe even two cups of this fine morning beverage. Relaxing with a cuppa, some good reading… and of course a pistol by my side. Life isn’t easy, but it is good.
“Life isn’t easy, but it is good.” May we all be blessed like that.