Hearth Raider

The young man with the dreadlocks emerged from nowhere one foggy morning last week and began cleaning the windows of the ferry pilot house.

Well, actually, he hadn’t come out of nowhere.

He was a crew member performing his normal duties, but to me it looked like he had just beamed down to earth from God knows where because I was in a fog of my own making.

Officially I was waiting on the 69th Street pier to catch the ferry to work, but my mind was so jumbled and unfocused that I barely knew where I was.

When I forced myself to stop, look, and get real, I suddenly saw the guy doing his cleanup routine.

The year is more than half over and I’m overdue to take stock of my efforts to make 2019 the best year ever (BYE). I’m not entirely satisfied, which is good to a point because you need to stay hungry if you want to keep improving.

But I also think that I put an awful lot of expectation into radically changing my ways in the new year—even though I promised myself that I wouldn’t—and I’m a little disappointed that my life isn’t completely different and all my goals haven’t been reached.

I am socializing more, particularly this weekend, when I had things to do Friday, Saturday, and today. But this was definitely an exception.

I’m not writing as much as I would like, largely because of my current work schedule and I’m going to have to address that and use the time I have more intelligently.

And that gets us to that little word “focus,” which the gang over at Merriam-Webster tells me originates from the Latin word for hearth or fireplace.

Isn’t the cool? Well, not cool temperature wise, but the concept is really funky.

A Foggy Day

I always think of being focused as being rigid and single-minded like a guided missile, but a hearth is a welcoming, healing place. Why think about anything else when you’re sitting in a front of a nice warm fire?

Thinking of focus in this way makes it a little less intimidating to me. Just like the word “discipline” sounds a bit severe, but you think of the word “disciple” and it takes on a much more positive meaning.

I’ve made some slight improvements in managing the anger and whatever progress I’ve made comes from being focused on the immediate situation and really looking at why I’m losing my temper.

On Friday morning I found my remote had gone on the fritz and would not change channels or switch to YouTube where I do my morning qigong routine.

The rage started to rise as I thought about catching my ferry and being late for work, but I focused on the problem, the real problem, not all the crap from the past.

I reminded myself that every time I call the cable company, the first, and usually only, thing they tell me to do is unplug the cable box for 30 seconds and then put the plug back in.

It took a couple of tries, but I got the remote back on line. Meanwhile, I had done a qigong routine on my smartphone, which was not optimal, but certainly, acceptable, and saved myself some highly toxic aggravation.

Now in the interest of full disclosure, I did sort of blow a gasket at my computer Saturday afternoon, when Microsoft Word refused to launch, causing my blood pressure to launch into the stratosphere.

It sucked big time because the only thing I focused on was my anger and not the solution.

I got lost in the fog that time, but my navigation is improving and if this keeps up maybe I’ll get a job on the ferry.