Category: carpe bucko

Mindfulness meditation involves a lot of being unmindfully distracted. It’s a normal thing. The key isn’t to stop being distracted but to acknowledge when it happens and return attention where you intend it to be. Gently, kindly.

John Green, on discovering the moon: I suppose I’d known moonlight existed, but somehow I had made it to adulthood without ever having a personal experience of it. And there was the world, lit by something that cannot shine light but still finds a way to share light. I look at the world, and the …

Life is hard, then you die. So what? Man up & deal with it.

If only it were that easy.

Running away and hiding is, of course, the exact opposite of willingness and perseverance.

It’s not that I don’t have any values; I am simply unable to define them. Which means, for all practical purposes, I don’t have any functional values. This is a problem. Because I have been able to get consistent long-term mental health care through the VA, meeting weekly (via phone thanks to Covid-19), I’m slowly …

When I was in kindergarten, I was sent to stand out in the hall for getting angry during some activity. I don’t believe I had a tantrum; I just got angry. Back then, a time-out was to be kicked-out. This is one of my earliest memories. A few years later, second grade I think, I …

As a former Christian turned atheist, I have a lot of stuff that continues to linger. Perhaps most useful, as compared to the crap dealing with being good, guilt, etc, is the question of spirituality. While I do believe that the universe is an entirely physical thing, not only are there mysteries about which we …

A friend messaged me the other day to chastise me for not turning to them for help when my ex-housemate robbed me of a bunch of stuff, including my entire month’s SNAP allocation. My immediate response was to send a return message apologizing and explaining … but then I stopped, and I understood:

It began with this sentence from the book “The Nurturing Effect” by Anthony Biglan: In the first session, the parent consultant befriended the family and began to learn about how parents were …. And my immediate reaction was: Befriend? Seriously? You could almost see the sneer. But almost immediately, a different thought came to mind: …

YouTube decided I needed to meet Jeremy Fielding. For once, YouTube was right. I did need to meet Jeremy. The algorithm was trying to make me into a source of income, of course, but, by this happy accident, I found something I needed at the exact moment I needed it. Sometimes we depend, not on …