Living is a hack these days. I like it better this way. It's better than living with bags of regret and no remedies.
I won't say what I have to regret, but there is something almost daily. If I didn't care I wouldn't care, but I've always been reflective and it's not going to stop this week, or next, so out of desperation I guess, I found something else to do besides hate myself for what I've done in the past out of ignorance, or shyness, or inexperience, or laziness, or wrong-headedness.
Now I hack. Hack myself.
Maybe this approach started due to the influence of Craig and Lucy. They are retired dairy farmers. They now own a cafe in Cuenca, Ecuador, the Windhorse Cafe. They follow Tibetan Buddhist practices and lead meditation sessions at the cafe. It's a thing for them, a big one, and also apparently for others.
I heard a woman in her 60s gleefully exclaim "I'm a Buddhist!" Go for it, gal. Done in the tone of the Smothers Brothers' "Streets of Laredo" parody: "If you have an outfit you can be a cowboy too."
Point One: Being a buddhist (in, if I may say, the real sense), means that you don't claim to be one
Point Two: If you're a Buddhist you don't get there by buying a t-shirt and wearing it around town.
Point Three: Diet isn't a thing. Claiming to be a Buddhist and being a vegetarian and using one to prove the other doesn't prove anything.
Point Four: You're grown up. You should know better by now.
I taught myself to meditate beginning back in 1964 or 1965. It took 10 or 15 years before I started to catch on. I wanted to be a Buddhist too, but I'm not a joiner. There was no one to join in Bismarck anyway, but still I don't play well with others, so I had to do everything the hard way while being honest with myself.
The years tell. As decades go by, a person matures and gains perspective on things simply while continuing to breathe. Things stick to you the way lint sticks to a shirt. Things have stuck to me. I now claim that there is no magic. I will never be a Buddhist, and don't want to be one. I still have sporadic episodes of meditation, but that's my private deal. It's not going anywhere. Meditation doesn't go anywhere.
I can say that the single most important thing I've learned is how to meditate. I'll stand by that.
However, I'll also say that there is no enlightenment — it's a brain hack. Meditate and you hack your brain.
Keep hacking and eventually you change the way your brain operates. That's it. No magic. No religion needed. No rituals. No secret handshake.
Hack harder and longer and you will probably get bigger changes sooner, but there is no guarantee, and no matter what you'll still get old and ugly and then die, unless you die sooner, in which case you'll still die, but with less oldness and less ugliness.
Meditation does change how you think about things and how you feel about things, and overall it's a good deal, but going around squeaking about how advanced you are or how Buddhist you are this week or how much you know that no one else knows is not a sign that you have the real item. In fact, you never have anything — you change a bit here and there, subtly, and maybe take a more nuanced and helpful approach to life, and don't get your shorts tied in so many knots.
That's about it.
And then for the rest, I'm extending the hacking idea to my life in general.
When something happens I try to figure out out why, or to figure out what could have made it work, if it possibly could have worked but didn't, and then yell into my internal ear "HACK!", and remember it. Then do the hack next time, to get things right, rather than doing the same dumb wrong thing over and over. Or feeling nasty about myself.
Now, currently, I'm in western Washington state. I arrived February 27. I wanted to come early to get a good deal on a used car, at a time when there was still a good supply at depressed winter prices, and little competition. That worked.
What hasn't worked quite so well is that, once I accomplished that, the weather turned especially bad, and there has been nasty rain for the last month. Mostly I've been spending days at the library and nights sleeping in my car in the rain. Heavy rain. Rain and wind. Record rainfall. Waiting for the car's paperwork to grind its way along. That took the full 45 days, oh joy forever.
But, there is a hackishness to this too. I am tired of waiting, and am way behind on such projects as modifying the car's interior to make it more amenable to living in and to sleeping in, but I know that the weather will catch up to the calendar. I know that things will improve. I know that spring will really come, and then that real summer will be here, and then that I will forget what I'm going through now, and that I will be doing a lot of fun traveling and fun backpacking.
But not yet. Not today.
Today, as in weeks previous, and for some (small) time to come I will be moving slowly and will continue to be frustrated by weather. But the deal is that I'm hacking the hiking season. I'm living outside, though (gratefully) protected by the hard shell of a car, with plenty of money for fuel, a car which supplies mobility and heat and electricity to power what devices I have, and all that, and I have two places where I can shower up any day I need to (each). I'm OK here, sitting but sitting alertly, just as though I'm some goddamn meditation master smirking at the universe and watching it unfold.
"Gimme shot — gimme best shot, you. Hah! You call that shot? Piss on you, eh?" That's me, sort-of.
I'm getting to see the hiking season develop. Getting to see my opinions change, my plans change, my gear closet fill up, my thoughts about where to go and when and where to go first, and second, and later some time, and then maybe where to go at the end of this season, and what to do with my car and my clothes then, and what about next year, if there is a next year. I'm learning. I'm watching the lotus blossom.
Which means that I'm hacking my life some more. I'm gaining perspective. It's like a meditation retreat, except while sleeping in my car. And eating in my car, and urinating in my car, and changing clothes in my car, and (although not yet, not yet this trip), defecating in my car (into a plastic bag, of course).
Yeah, so lucky me. I could be in Cuenca now, watching fall arrive. There now, in Cuenca now, the season is the equivalent of mid-November, because Cuenca is south of the equator. In truth, Cuenca is deep into winter, winter being the rainy season, when not huge amounts of rain fall, but when rain falls regularly and when the temperature overnight is in the low to mid 40s (°F) and the day's high might touch 55°F. It gets effing cold with no heat and almost no sun. But still it's more pleasant than what I'm in now. But still, this here-and-now stuff is what I wanted. Go figga.
So, nothing especially to do now, at this moment, but to continue observing, learning, and updating my approach, i.e., keep on with the hacking.
Which sounds good. Not that bad. OK. Tolerable.
I hope I'm as smart as I sometimes think I sound.