I’ve been meditating daily for almost a year, dutifully checking it off the to-do list once I’ve sat quietly, breathing in and out.  I usually do this early in the morning, though there are times when I forget or don’t have time, and then I phone it in right before bed, fidgeting around while the meditation app plays just so I can cross it off my list.  Look, I did it.

But in ticking off the box, I’ve missed the point.  I started out really meditating for the sake of quieting my mind, but I’m now meditating for the sake of completing the task.  I know this.  I feel it all the time, how I come out of meditation feeling the same way as when I went in.

Clearly, I need to return to meditating for real, but I also really love this idea of scheduling in quiet time.  Maybe not the suggested half hour because I just don’t have that kind of time in my life right now if I also want to catch up with Josh, but more than the four minutes the teacher uses in that TED post.

Does it need to be screen-free?  The article specifically mentions over and over again that it’s the screen that’s creating this monkey-mind, but… I think about the time that I spend reading blogs.  I’m not jumping around, feeling frantic.  That’s me time.  That’s quiet time and thinking time.  I’ll admit that reading on the phone means that I’m more likely to stop reading and start playing Farm Heroes, but sometimes the judgment of screens feels like old quotes you hear about other technological advances, such as bound books or telephones.  It’s not going to ruin us any more than telegraphs ruined us.  Telegraphs didn’t ruin us… right?  Or maybe it did, but this will ruin us in the same way.

Anyway, I put a 15 minute alarm on my phone so I’ll remember to take 15 minutes to read or write or think.  Maybe sometimes read blogs, other times read books.  Whatever makes me feel quiet.

Do you schedule in quiet time or just grab it where you can find it?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

*******

Real Simple put out a form this summer for conducting a chore audit in your home.  It’s a little limiting, and it would probably work better if it had it as Person A, Person B, Person C, etc. and you could fill in the name and work on the form together.  But it’s a fantastic idea to take an honest look at what everyone does and see where people can step in to help.

Because you may think you’re doing everything and then realize as you fill out the form that other people in the home sometimes take those tasks.  Or you may think that you’re not doing enough but then see how much you’re actually doing to keep the home running.

Like there are only six tasks on that list that are solely mine.  Almost everything else, Josh or the twins do a quarter or half the time.  And there are four things I never — or almost never — do.

Take a look at the chore audit list.  How do chores in your house shake out?

*******

Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I am smitten with Rafaël Rozendaal’s Look at Something site.  You can click over and play with that.  Make sure you move your mouse all over the screen.

Everything Always Everywhere is also quite good.

Once upon a time I loved Do Nothing for Two Minutes, but it’s not like their old app where the picture moved.  I’m searching for an ocean scene, a website beach equivalent of the televised burning log for Christmas.

What are your favourite sites to stare at?

I’ve been glued all week to coverage for Hurricane Florence.  We planned to be in Chincoteague this weekend, but on Tuesday, they closed the town for visitors and started evacuations.  We moved our trip.  Then on Wednesday, the storm turned and there was a lot of conflicting information flying around online whether the evacuation was still in place or not for the town.  We’re keeping to the new plan.

At the current moment, DC is no longer in the path.  We’ll just get rain.  But my heart is in my throat thinking about the Carolinas.  Be safe.

*******

Speaking of heart in my throat moments, I saw that I had a bunch of unread posts in my blog reader.  So I clicked into the folder and realized they were all for MLO Knitting.  She died about five years ago.

They were spam posts; someone had clearly purchased her blog’s lapsed URL and was posting spam.  I sat with the thought for a long time, and then finally unsubscribed.  I logically knew there would never be another post, but I didn’t want to sever that last tie.  Is that silly?  To keep someone who is gone in your blog feed reader?  It made me sad to know that the blog isn’t there anymore.

*******

Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Day 17 – Empowerment – Part 1” (Anne Heffron)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Don’t Count Your Eggs has a post about phantom pregnancies; those moments where we think we’re pregnant, even though our heart also knows that we’re not.  This resonated with me because after we stopped treatments, I had a few times where I purchased pregnancy tests, sure that we had gotten lucky.  But… no.  I also mentally knew that it wasn’t likely.  She describes it: “Some days the word embrace seems to fit. Others… I’m totally convinced I’m P, because perhaps there is something that just doesn’t feel finished to me.”  Yes.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom’s blog title repeated a few times in my life these past few weeks as I’ve pointed out in various places that a totally valid option for confronting systems or ideas that aren’t working is “burn it all down.”  She makes the most amazing life change, and it leads to her taking charge of her career.  She writes, “For now, I’m done with the ladder. I need time and space to figure out where I want to take my career. I need to branch out to trying different things.”  Love this post.

Lastly, Anabegins has a very honest post that resonated with me.  It’s about eating and exercise and all the feelings you get when you notice that you can’t do what others can do.  The paragraph that begins with this: “I was watching how the others were eating/drinking on this trip and they seemed to exert much more self-control” — that is me.  We all eat differently, we all different needs, but that paragraph had me nodding my head through the whole thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Worried about the hurricane.  An unwanted unsubscribing.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 7th and September 14th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I read a fascinating article about the coining of the term “stress,” and the regrets the scientist, Hans Selye, had in the misunderstanding of his work.  Through a combination of poor explanation of concepts and mistakes in translation, we now have this belief that we can avoid stress or combat stress or reduce stress.

The article states:

Meanwhile, in popular culture, stress quickly took on a negative connotation. The public’s understanding was that stress existed outside of ourselves and was to be avoided, which contradicted Selye’s position. He posited that stress was unavoidable, because it was literally a function of every adaptation to change. Even in our sleep, our heart still has to beat, we still need to breathe, our adrenal system is still responding to dreams, we’re still under stress, he told an interviewer for the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. “The opposite of stress is death,” he said.

In other words, the only way to avoid stress is to be dead.  We want stress because stress means that we’re living.  When you look at it that way, that stress is something within ourselves that we continually navigate (and that doing so is “living”), it becomes a relationship, albeit one built on “the gap between demand and capacity.”

I’ve been meaning to read Kelly McGonigal’s The Upside of Stress, and this article (which references her) nudged me to move it to the active to-read pile.  I love this idea: “Rather than bemoaning stress or avoiding it, or worse, feeling proud of having an abundance of it, perhaps the best advice now is that we ought be practicing methods for transforming it.”

I like that idea of transforming stress and using it as fuel rather than something that needs to be swept out the door like tracked in dirt.

What will you do with your stress?