The Wallpaper of Life

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Days gone by and you don’t remember much. You arrive at work and wonder who the hell has been driving. Can’t remember what you wore yesterday. It’s a mindfulness thing. “Lost in space” becomes a habit.

A bad habit.

I’m writing this because my left shoulder has been troubling. Enough so that it’s hard to pull my shirt on in my conventional way. I need to put on my shirt, uh, differently.

I don’t recall who infused in me the idea that it’s smart to occasionally shake things up. To forsake tradition and forge a different day. Little things that have become autonomic—done without much thought. Any thought. Zero.

Once it occurs to you, it’s simple. Take a different route to work. Brush your lower teeth first. Start with the other leg when you put your pants on. And—though necessary for me right now, this one’s actually pretty confusing: put your other arm into your shirtsleeve first.

Neurolinguists and practicing Buddhists know that internal chit-chat creates all sorts of problems. Artificial realities. Like “self” for instance, the biggest hoax of all. And simply because we have all that chatter going on, reliving the past or portending an imaginary future, we miss out on only real opportunity we have to affect our world … the now.

So blow the other nostril first. Start with the other shoe. It’s a whole new world out there.

Left/Right, Conservative/Liberal – Don’t give me that crap.

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Impossibly simplistic, such jargon is only a basis for disagreement. Reality is far more nuanced. When I claimed, for instance, be be a moderate, I was implored by a late conservative friend that “a moderate is just a gutless liberal.”

Really?

Try this on for size: we should make policy decisions as though running a business. Pretty sure most of my “conservative” friends would applaud the idea; my “liberal” friends, not so much. Until I point out that in health care, for instance, we have a procurement problem. What business manager or procurement officer in right mind would pay twice or more what the rest of the world pays for anything? For similar, or in some cases worse outcomes?

We need to change the way we procure. As any thoughtful manager would.

It’s a gray-ish world out there. Not black versus white. So don’t lump me a conservative for saying we should use more common business sense. In advocating health-care overhaul, self-described conservatives would brand me otherwise. But don’t lump me liberal.

The sooner people realize the damage done by lumping, the sooner Congress or our State Legislature can get back to examining policy on merits and faults.