The Great Outdoors 7/2/21

Is it just us or does it seem like the older we get, the more time flies? I mean it seems like only yesterday when we were stuck indoors, wearing masks every time we stepped outside. The thought of going to a restaurant or an outdoor baseball game seemed out of the question. And now? 17,000 people are packed into indoor basketball arenas, maskless, screaming their heads off. And are we really on the cusp of Independence Day 2021 already? So John and I decided we would celebrate our recent relative freedom by doing a maskless 4th of July celebration. With a tan line. If you remember last year’s 4th of July version, we had our guys mistakenly squirting a giant size bottle of hand sanitizer on their hot dogs. This year, a few lines from masking up outdoors. That is a definite sign of progress.

The second strip on your scroll is one of our favorites. As John says to me, you just live your life and tell me the incidents and I will make them funny. To me they are funny enough already, but as my dominant sense is verbal, and comics are basically a visual medium, I see his point. As James Thurber, a noted author and cartoonist once said, “A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.” In any case I was supposed to be writing about the comic. Here’s the inspiration; my wife and I sold our house and moved to an apartment when our kids were grown up and living on their own. One of my favorite activities is to go out on the deck, sit in a lounge chair to meditate and look out over the Hudson River. We planted beautiful pots of flowers on the deck to enhance the view. I like to go outside and commune with nature as I do a 20-minute meditation. The birds are attracted to the flowers and often come and sit on the deck railing by the flowers and call out to each other. At first I thought this was incredibly charming and wonderful. Then the birds got a little louder and started calling to each other from other decks. It got so I couldn’t concentrate on my meditation. Caw, caw, Tweet, Tweet, CHIRP, CHIRP! Suddenly my calm was broken and I started thinking, “Will you shut the f@#% up already!” And there you have it, with the add-on of a concerned neighbor thrown in for a laugh. I actually don’t have a concerned neighbor, or if I did, she was out of town, because I gave those birds a piece of my mind alright. I guess it didn’t matter because they were back the next day and every day thereafter. We sure showed them. We just rented a beach house and left them behind. Now all I have to interrupt my meditation are crickets, cicadas and whatever crazy, unsanitary thoughts are rolling through my mind at the moment. That’s all. But in fact, that’s a lot.

See you next week with two new ones, both maskless.

Andy and John

Meditations on Meditation 1/29/21

A couple weeks ago I was in a virtual meeting via Zoom. I was feeling a bit stressful when a friend of mine, Rena DeLevie, sent me an article she had written for HuffPost on the topic of meditation, a sort of how to guide that said to me, however you want to go about it, do it like that. I thought about how I used to do it on the Metro North Railroad, while wearing noise-cancelling headphones, how I would shut myself in a room at home and invariably end up falling asleep, or how I used to purloin one of the rooms set aside for lactating women at work so that I could have a 20 minute session when the need to meditate came on. The article gave me such a good laugh, I shared it with John and it became the inspiration for our three-part series on, you guessed it, meditation. Here is a link to Rena’s very funny guide to meditation:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-feisty-guide-to-meditat_b_9421350

This week you saw the final two installments of our three-part series. In part two Marv picks out a mantra, at Al’s urging. As the aforementioned article said, anything will work. Well, this actually pisses me off since my wife and I paid a small fortune to get our mantras “specially chosen for us” by some Maharishi named Katz at a Westchester Center for TM (don’t ask how much, ‘cause I’m not telling). In fact, and this may go into the category of TMI or Too Much Information (for you folks that hate acronyms) but I frequently push away thoughts of my next meal when meditating. So when the article mentioned tuna fish as a possible mantra, John and I just ran with it. By the way, I do recall my maharishi or guru (or whatever you call him) telling me NOT to meditate right after a meal. “It’s better to be alert,” he said. Well, I beg to differ, unless you want to keep muttering “guacamole” as you put myself into a restful state.

The third and final installment comes from the TM (that’s Transcendental Meditation for you acronym haters) teachings on meditation. They tell you to concentrate on clearing your mind by repeating your mantra softly, to yourself. If you said it out loud, people would likely think you were crazy for talking to yourself about suuuu-shi rollllls, or tuuuu-na or whatever it is you’ve chosen (see, I’m writing this around lunchtime and can’t help the damn food references). The trouble comes with the clearing your mind part. It’s like that old saying, try not to notice the elephant in the room. It’s all you can notice. Try not to think of anything else except your mantra, go ahead, I dare ‘ya. But eat first, trust me.

So that’s it for this week. Thanks as always for reading The New 60 and the blog and for passing it on to your friends. We will see you next week with two new ones and no, they will not be about meditation.

Andyyyyyyy and Johnnnnnnn