Solitaire

I made a couple of wrong moves yesterday -- smoked a cigarette and ate pizza.

The cigarette I found while going through mom's stuff. It was by itself in one of those little boxes of four the dope merchant corporations used to pay people to hand out free on the street. Try this one, and you too will soon be hooked. God knows how old it was.

And it was horrible. There were scented matches or something carrying a scent in the shoebox where I found it, and it tasted like soap. Still, I smoked it to the end, then eight hours or so later, in the late afternoon felt a particular pain in the lungs that is always caused by cigarette smoke, and never anything else.

Later on, in the evening, I didn't feel like cooking, so I ordered up a small vegetarian pizza and drove the 20-mile round trip required to get it home. It was a beautiful day and I didn't mind. Got it home and it tasted great. But I woke up this morning feeling like a B-1 bomber with a big load of bombs.

These were both good wake-up calls. There's no "up side" left in smoking; it's all a downer. And I've been slipping in my diet, eating a little too much meat, cheese, etc., and not enough rice and vegetables.

The way we feel, day-to-day and minute-to-minute depends on a few fundamentals -- exercise, adequate rest, and what we put into our bodies. I've reached the point now where I can feel the effects of bad decisions immediately, and take corrective steps.

I've been concentrating for the past year on the physical and vital function (i.e., digestion, respiration, etc.) aspects of life -- the annamaya and the pranamaya -- and now I'm ready to incorporate attention to the manomaya -- the intellectual existence -- and will begin to learn to train thought itself. That's the plan, anyway, and I have the right instructor.

I've grown used to the solitary life and come to actually prefer it. It's perfect for the intense self-exploration I'm doing right now.

This may all sound very self-centered, but what I'm learning is going to be applied to service to others in the not-too-distant future.

On a side note, I started taking a nutritional supplement, L-Dopa, as a remedy for Parkinson's disease three days ago. It's an extract of the tropical legume mucusa pruriens, or velvet bean, which has been used in India to treat the disease for over 4,000 years. So far I've noticed some modest improvement in the symptoms, and I'm hoping for more.

Photograph, "The Buddha Watches," by Dave Brice.

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