Upcoming Posts, a Recycled Post, and a Quick Dog Story

I’m moving 6 days from now. I am not completely freaking out about getting all the things done to be ready for Move Day, but I’m about 87.349% of the way to peak freak out level. This continues to be my excuse for missing a post on Wednesday evening and sharing another recycled post today.

A Dog Story

First, I’ve got a little dog story. My dog is not little, but the story is. When her foster mom from a wonderful local rescue agency dropped her off here in her new home, she had three stuffed animal toys. I assumed those were precious things to her, or at least favorite toys. Lucy - pictured above - has shown zero interest in any of the three stuffties, on Day 1 and ever since. I got rid of two of them after a couple months and only kept the weird looking one in the photo above with Lucy. I don’t know what that is meant to be, so I have just called him The Green Guy when taking about it with Lucy.

Usually talking about means encouraging her to kill The Green Guy, or at least do him some harm - feisty dog attack style. She has mostly had no interest in that - with a rare, occasional little poke at him with her nose, or the sort of connection in the photo.

This morning in the middle of our get ready to go for a walk routine, when she’s always doing a bit of a happy dance, she suddenly flopped to the floor and attacked The Green Guy. Grabbed him, shook him around with head swings, a full-on land shark attack. And I could not stop laughing during the attack. I was too busy laughing to get a good photo or video, but I’m hoping there will be a next time. I’m even thinking we might go out toy shopping today.

Upcoming Post Topics

Once I get myself moved and settled in at the new place, I want to catch up on writing about at least some of these things:

• SearchGPT vs Perplexity and being much better than traditional search engines

• Pixel 9 Pro XL thoughts after a month of using it as my daily driver phone

• Finding more ways to use NotebookLM, Claude, and maybe even checking in on how Pi is doing as the most personal of the chatbots

Recycled: Rookie Buddhist Thoughts

This is one of the first things I posted on Substack, just a few week after starting on the platform. A more personal post and a topic I enjoyed writing / talking out loud about. Here it is:

For the last few years I’ve been reading a lot on Buddhism. I started with ‘Buddhism for Busy People’ - a very light, fun read and a sort of gateway drug (in the best possible sense) that pumped up my desire to learn lots more. After that I have read numerous books on Buddhism and mindfulness, in printed and digital and audiobook forms. Here are just a few authors and titles that have impacted me the most:

• The Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, poet, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh

• The Dalai Lama, including ‘The Art of Happiness’ and his 5 book series ‘Be Inspired’

• Sam Harris - ‘Waking Up’

• Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield on mindfulness and Buddhist principles

• ‘The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World’ - here’s a small piece of this one’s description:

In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness's eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life's inevitable suffering?

So why I am interested in learning about Buddhism and trying to embrace it along with mindfulness? I’ve found a lot of reasons, and continue to find more as I learn more.

It feels easy and natural. At its core (my rookie, very amateur take here) it is all about kindness and compassion - for others and for all sentient beings. The Buddha taught that kindness is our true nature, our default setting :) And that is powerful and accurate for me. Being friendly to someone I don’t know is easy. Taking a minute to talk to a homeless person, to treat them with respect, offer them a bottle of water, or a warm hat when it’s cold outside, or just eye contact and chat and a smile, is easy.

There’s a part of a walking meditation mantra that I practice that says that I want to focus on loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. The joy part speaks of joy in virtuous thoughts and actions. This also feels easy and true to me. A silly analogy, but it’s like the saying about how giving a gift at Christmas time makes us happier than receiving one - but as more of an always-on, every day experience.

The Buddha is not a deity to be worshipped. He was just a human being who found a path to enlightenment and then shared teachings on this path so that any of us can follow it.

The Buddha’s teachings are not to be rigidly accepted without questioning. They are meant to be greeted with skepticism wherever that is our natural reaction to them.

The Dalai Lama emphasizes respect for all religions, not just Buddhism. He emphasizes seeing what we we all have in common - we are all human beings - not the things that divide us.

There are studies that show that mindfulness and finding happiness in kindness can have beneficial, physical effects on our brains. I know that this data will not be accepted or believed by everyone, but I’m buying it.

There are many other Buddhist principles that resonate for me - interconnectedness and karma just to name a couple more.

I am obviously not a Buddhist scholar, not by a long long shot. I don’t claim to have knowledge of all the different branches of Buddhism, or even to know one branch with any great depth. I just find that as I learn about it and practice small, simple parts of it, it makes me happy. Makes me feel that maybe I am just a little bit better human being.