saturn return to sender

It took 20 years for the world noosphere to be committed to an etherdeep repository. Once the transfer was started, it was considered bad form to stop it, even as technology raced ahead and the cost of ether prying dropped so much that even a few of the world’s wealthiest individuals were said to have personal teleportation devices. Farcasters, as they were being called—apparently a nod to a late 20th century science fiction author.

The second download took 41.98 seconds.

The initial policy was to commit a complete diff every week, of every netlined mind and its property, but it quickly became clear that the cost of comparing two versions of the human mind outweighed the cost of just dumping a new copy every week. There were too many organic variations to learn, and hundreds of millions of new minds coming online every week, and only so many AIs to do the work.

The exact time of the weekly commit was never published, and you weren’t supposed to feel anything when the cursor reached you. But I have, from time to time. I can tell. Sometimes I lose my train of thought. Sometimes I feel, for no reason, suddenly elated, or frightened, or cold. Sometimes I find myself thinking about a place I’ve never been, or people I don’t know: a green and stone temple at sunset, a smiling girl in a yellow flightsuit, a delicate painting of a dragon in red and black hanging on a white wall.

They’re not my memories.

It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but somewhere in The Chronicles of Amber, either Corwin or his son Merlin notes that he resents pain, or depression (I forget which), because it gives you tunnel vision. It constricts your horizons, erodes your ability to cope by blacking out everything but the suffering. I’ve always thought that was a pretty good description.

The ocean is clear and deep, but on the surface its storms can be fickle and frightening.

Today I ran about half as far as I normally do when I run at work. Cruised along at a more leisurely pace. I tend to think I have to pound pretty hard to get the runner’s high to which I’ve become slightly addicted. Or at least to feel like I’ve accomplished something. But my back is recovering from an injury and I’ve hardly exercised in the past week, so I allowed myself to take it easy.

On the way back, I settled into a nice long-stride pace and focused on relaxing. I imagined that the run was a continuous, controlled fall. I noticed the rhythmic pressure on the heels and balls of my feet, felt each impact compress my foot, ankle, and leg, and allowed the fall to carry my weight forward into the next compression. I tried to fall with an open chest and noble spine.

Off and on, focusing on the feeling of it all, the run dissolved into a sense of floating forward and a gentle pressure—the pressure of the exertion required to maintain everything. That was it. It was not at all unpleasant. It was not a concept in my mind, but a feeling in which I was immersed, like a pool of warm water, or the weight of a lover’s body, and there wasn’t room for much else. All the little discomforts and pains were still around, somewhere. But they weren’t very important. The exertion’s breathing was a wave, and I was what the wave felt like. I was nothing other than that.

During an IM chat inspired by Clarissa’s post on non-attachment, Orwell, and Gandhi last week, I told Enjelani that I don’t usually find running to be very meditative. Maybe I try too hard, maybe I’m too worried about improving my time. Later, Jet and I talked about choosing a direction in life, rather than a specific goal. A goal is too restrictive; liable to anchor your identity to something imaginary. If it never comes to be, what then are you? If it does come to be … what, then, are you?

I do think that, somehow, the feeling of gently losing yourself to the exertion of something—anything—is part of the answer to non-attachment. How can you love someone and still practice non-attachment? I’m not sure, but maybe a paradoxical commitment to both is the exertion itself, is the thing to which you must surrender. It makes no sense, but in the floating-fall of my little run today, there was no need for thought. There was only the exertion. Somehow, that was enough.

I tested for shodan in aikido a few months ago. That’s first-degree (lowest-ranked) black belt. The first aikido class I ever went to was in Spartanburg, South Carolina. 1994, I think. (Thanks, Dad!) There were a couple of years around 2000 where I wasn’t really training, but still, that’s about 12 years of fairly consistent aikido for me. It’s been non-stop since 2002, and I’ve been with Boulder Aikikai since 2003.

That’s not me in the photo, by the way. That’s Karl and Tracy, both of whom are bad ass, and quite senior to me. They’re in front of Mt Sopris, at Boulder Aikikai’s Annual Summer Camp in the Rockies, which was two weeks ago. I’ll post a few more photos here as soon as I get Lightroom working on my laptop again.

So the black belt feels a little overdue in some ways, but not so much in others. I am glad for the recognition, and I do feel qualified to, say, teach beginners the basic open-hand stuff and ukemi. But I was chatting with a friend in the dojo today about how aikido is an apparently bottomless rabbit hole. You think you’re making progress and that you know a thing or two, then you run into someone with whom your little tricks and techniques utterly fail. “OK,” you think to yourself. “I know nothing.”

Or, you train with people who work with levels of effortlessness, grace, and power you know are possible, but still beyond your own practice.

Either way, new expanses of unexplored terrain open before you. That happens a lot. It’s why we keep coming back. It keeps raising questions about body/mind/awareness/relationship/spirit/etc/etc. Also, it’s a lot of fun. And you meet some of the best people: beautiful, funny, strong, caring, flawed. And so on …

Anyway, I think I’ll be doing this thing for a while. Here’s to another 12, 24, 30, or 40 years of training …*