I just gave a talk, an introduction to acupuncture and Chinese medicine. It went over pretty well, although I went so far in the direction of trying not to look like I was marketing my business that I neglected to actually market my business much! So I gathered no names and numbers to follow up on, I just have to hope people were impressed enough to want treatment.

I’m adequate enough to come across well in public speaking. I think I could be a lot better at it, if I practiced. With my many goals in life, I’m not sure that it’s something I want to spend my time on. But I could, at some point.

Just for fun, here’s a brief history of my public speaking career:

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I really, really don’t understand this attitude.

I came across a conversation where a guy described this problem.

About a year ago my dad was diagnosed with arachnoiditis after a doctor fucked up on his back surgery. He can no longer walk, and is in near constant pain (howling in pain randomly in the night, etc). He also went deaf at the same time and developed Bell’s Palsy which messes with his eyes, causing them to dry out and him to sleep with his eyes open sometimes.

… The only thing they can do for him is give him pain medications. They’re also thinking about putting in an electric shocker device in his back to help with the painful cramping – think charlie horse x 1000.

Then I innocently asked if he had considered trying acupuncture or any other form of alternative medicine. This was his response:

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For a while, this blog’s one-line description (at the upper left corner of the page) has been, “Discovering the magic and the meaning in the mundane.”

I decided to change it, because obviously this is not quite accurate.

While it’s true that I’m constantly and deeply searching for magic and meaning in the mundane world, what makes this quest significant is that the mundane world is not an inert thing to me. The “mundane” is, in fact, a repository of difficulty, suffering and violence, and this is not to be lightly swept aside with simplistic New Age characterizations, or minimized by compressing it all into the word “mundane.”

On the other hand, “magic and meaning” is a phrase that also quickly sounds trite and clichéd. Instead, I’ll use the term “Great Mystery,” since it more closely matches the vastness of what I look for. Not any easy answers or pretty things, not the easy “love and light,” but a Beauty and an experience of Grace or Divinity so powerful that too much of it could incinerate your skin and obliterate your innards. The kind of Divine Light that requires profound dedication and preparation in order to glimpse. That’s what I’m searching for.

Nothing small, though they may be found in the smallest of things. The positive and negative poles of the cosmos in every cell, and in every moment.

And why initiation? Because the process of constantly walking that boundary is the process of constant initiation. Death and rebirth, with all of the pain and joy that accompany them, never cease.

That just about covers it.

I bought a laptop three years ago to use at school. I bought it used on eBay. This model had overheating problems. It started shutting down after only a few minutes on. Eventually I took it someplace and they charged me $200 to replace the processor, which fixed the problem.

A couple months ago, it started happening again, so I had to stop using it. Lately I’ve thought about getting it repaired or replaced. Both of those cost a lot of money though.

Then I finally did some hunting around online. Found an obscure blog post by somebody who had this exact problem with this exact computer, and fixed it by doing something called flashing the bios. So I flashed the bios, which basically consisted of downloading a little program, which took a few seconds, and running it, which took a couple of minutes. The most nerve-wracking part was running that bios update program. It was nerve-wracking because I had read all these warnings about how if the bios update is interrupted, it could render the computer completely unusable. I was afraid that the computer would overheat and shut down while the bios update was running, so I packed bags of frozen vegetables all around it while it was running.

It got done a lot sooner than I thought it would, for such a nerve-wracking procedure.

And it fixed the computer!

Fully functioning computer, repaired for free!

That’s it. No big spiritual insight. Just pleased with myself.

I just wanted to balance out the harshness of the last post with this.

I was taking care of a patient one day, months and months ago, who was dying of end-stage breast cancer. All day long I’d go in there to make sure she was okay and if she needed anything, and she just looked so frail and uncomfortable. Every time, though, she assured me she was all right, but I could see the tears in her eyes, and she just looked frightened and small. She was trying so hard to be brave and strong, despite her terminal condition.

Later on, her husband came in, who was a little old man with a cane. Her face brightened the moment she saw him, and she managed to stand up on her thin, unsteady legs to give him a hug and a kiss. He helped her back down on to the bed, and they sat that way, side by side, for the rest of the afternoon, just talking and holding hands and being together.

At one point, I walked by the room and saw him put a hand to her face and brush some of her hair away from her eyes. It was so beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time, this sweet couple enjoying what could be the lady’s last afternoon on earth in a hospital bed, together. There was so much love in that room, I felt like I had never seen so much love in two people’s eyes, and it was absolutely the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Here are a couple of posts from Internet discussion forums. The first is excerpted from some advice to a young person who was down on his luck.

Frankly, you sound pretty “poor me” at the moment. I suspect that the reason that you haven’t already done these things is because you’re either too lazy or too much of a pussy to turn your world upside in order to get the job done. You also sound like you blame everyone else in the world for your problems. Stop that shit already.

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As fitting a description of the modern-day Tyrant as any I’ve found. From Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job.

Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through the process of economic survival of the fittest.

There’s a mystique about the human heart that goes way beyond its apparent physical function. The word “heart” is accepted in common speech as metaphor for emotional experience, even in our supposedly secular and unsuperstitious day and age. In truth, I find it hard to argue that the seat of a person’s feeling-self is centered in the middle of the chest, right around where the heart organ is. That’s how I experience my feelings, at least.

In Chinese medicine, the classics describe the heart as a monarch governing the rest of the body. Not only does the duty of regulating blood flow go to the heart, but also the activity of the five senses and of the mind itself. Indeed, for disorders of the psyche and loss of consciousness in Chinese medicine, treatment principles are traditionally aimed, not at the brain, but at the heart.

This has been on my mind lately because, in my investigation of my own needs, I’ve determined that my heart is weak. It lacks nourishment. My shen (spirit) is agitated, disturbed. It is without root.

And I’m certainly not alone.

It can be thought of as perhaps the most widespread epidemic that nobody cares about. A sickness of the heart, a lack of root, contributes to so many other ills of the world. But it is silent, invisible, merely a vague psychic ache in the chest, and we push it aside and carry on with earning our daily bread or whatever other tasks we must accomplish to fend off disaster. So we forget the needs of the heart.

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During my senior year of high school, I performed George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with the high school band.

I had been playing the violin and piano since I was five or six, and was naturally talented, but indifferent. Music never spoke strongly to me; as it was, I was content to continue going to lessons and picking up random classical pieces here and there, and participating in orchestras.

I was never really introduced to anything but classical music until fairly late in childhood, and even then I felt kind of like it wasn’t okay to listen to anything non-classical.

My piano teacher introduced me to “Rhapsody in Blue.” Basically, because of my musical ignorance, I always let my teachers pick my pieces for me. But this was the first one that caught my imagination. I would listen to Leonard Bernstein’s performance of it over and over again, and imagine myself playing like he did. It sounded so grand, and fun. I admit that imagining myself being applauded by everyone was part of the fantasy.

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My office in Gurgaon didn’t exactly provide the most ideal working conditions. The municipal power was completely unreliable, so we had a shipping container-sized generator running almost full-time in our driveway, spewing diesel fumes into our office when the wind was right. We had no microwave, no refrigerator, and nowhere appropriate to wash our dishes. Worst of all, the improperly-installed urinals emptied into the same drain-line used to drain the floor, essentially creating an open-air sewer that filled the office with the stench of urine. But we made do.

And this is the most important concept we learned during our time in India: jugaad. Making do.

The nearest English equivalent is “jury-rigging”, but that translation doesn’t do jugaad justice. My coworker Anurag translated it as “a duct-tape arrangement.” Artist Sanjeev Shankar describes it as “attaining any objective with the available resources at hand”.

Jugaad is about improvising a solution. It’s about ingenuity in the face of adversity.

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