Busy Bee

How was your holiday everyone? The egghead has been up to all sorts of shenanigans in the past few weeks. School is on break. The kids go back on Jan. 5th but then we are leaving for Texas for two weeks on the 7th. I almost feel like January is over before it started.

I don't have much to say. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. and all that. I have made my new Year's Resolution. Last year's was to live a more inconvenient life. I think I was fairly successful in making some changes. I reduced my paper towel use to about 5% of what it once was. We began composting food. We doubled to tripled what we put in our recycling bin. I became more efficient in planning my daily trips to save gas. Overall I tried to be more thoughtful about how I do things. I'm going to give myself a solid B. Maybe a C+.

This year's resolution is to focus my meditation practice on the Buddhist principle of Right Speech. Right Speech means no lying, gossip or slander. It means not hurting people with your words. It also means your intent must be pure when you speak. I've read that Right Speech also means that your every word should be meaningful and help promote dharma so that even chitchat would be out but I'm not there yet.

There are a lot of reasons why I decided to focus on this. Some of it is that I find the news to be so relentlessly negative and depressing without any instruction to make the information they share useful. a man in california dressed up like Santa and killed 9 people. this is a tragedy to be sure but what benefit is it to those not living in his immediate vicinity to know about this. And the relentlessness of celebrity coverage has finally gotten to me. It adds nothing to the betterment of humanity. It's just a distraction. so I don't want to support that kind of speech anymore.

I will also work on my terrible habit of gossiping. I'm so bad. And again, do I really add anything to the people's lives that I gossip with. I would hate to know that people are talking about me. So why do i do it?

these are the changes I plan on making in the coming year.

I plan to be true to my values without trying to police the behavior of others. I want to be considerate of the effect of my words on my children, not just strangers.

I would like to stop using profanity. But I'm going to try and stop gossiping first.

Here's some follow up on things that I may or may not have followed up on:
Remember when i thought i was going deaf. Well it turns out I'm not. My hearing is borderline impaired. (Low enough to notice but good enough to not do anything about it). According to the audiologist my main problem is that I have four kids and live in a noisy environment.

That friend that I was mean to but then reunited with on facebook and I have a had a few very enjoyable lunches and may even go out to dinner with our fellas.Oh goodness it's 1 am and finn is up and that's why this post is so rambling. Well, I'll see you soon.