Up at 1 in the afternoon. Actually awake at 1, up at 3. I felt so tired last night I didn't practice shakuhachi at all, did 30 deep breaths on the Voldyne, and watched a bunch of stuff about Buddhism.
Awake now and there's a neat thing on the radio about a British lady whose husband got a plum job in Denmark so she got a crash course in being a Dane. Society in Denmark is very different from life in the Anglosphere, and she gradually got much happier than she was in Britain. People have health care and education taken care of, sick leave, bragging on oneself is discouraged, etc. It's a lot like Japanese society or the "local" society I grew up in in Hawaii.
She mentions how she changed, not locking her car or house obsessively like one must in the Anglosphere; she's not worried some stranger might rob her to put food on their table etc.
Compare and contract my moving from Hawaii to the mainland. Suddenly there was this far, of robbers, of "Mexicans", of earthquakes, yadda yadda. There was a homeless guy who'd live in my apartment complex with his mother, I think, who'd died and he had nowhere to go. He was considered dangerous but he was just hanging around what had been his home for years. Fear, fear, fear. Plus everything cost at least 2X what it did in Hawaii so now there was added the fear of losing my job, which paid about 2X minimum wage so while I barely made it on my pay, if I lost my job any job I got to replace it would pay me enough to be homeless and lose that job, too. In Hawaii I was saving up money.
I was not happy in Hawaii because I didn't have the perspective I have now. I needed to come to the mainland to get that perspective. A lot of Buddhist "house cleaning" needed to be done and still needs to be done.
I remember when I was very young, we went to the house of a family we were friends with, and one of the kids, about my age so around 5, showed me a little notebook where they'd drawn a little circle in pencil for each day. The idea of being conscientious enough to draw that little circle each day greatly impressed me and I felt an intense envy. I wanted that little notebook very badly. Of course the kid wouldn't give it to me, and no amount of fussing changed that.
Later I would feel envious of other kids for various things and there were things I would want very much, and caused myself a lot of suffering because of this. For instance, the Sears catalog had a bicycle called a "Screamer". I was really big on bicycles that looked like motorcycles, and the Screamer went the furthest toward this, its frame even being similar to a classic Norton "featherbed" frame. However many hints I dropped I never got that particular death trap as my mom's policy was Schwinn or nothing.
There were all sorts of things I wanted badly. Certain seashells for my collection, many different idiotic toys, and so on. One notable episode was when Cheerios had an offer on the box, for these rainbow colored things you'd put on your bike spokes. We ate a lot of Cheerios and finally the box tops were sent, and an eon later they came (the 6-8 weeks shipping time was a real thing in Hawaii) and in the end one set wasn't enough to cover all the spokes like on the bikes being ridden by the deliriously happy kids on the back of the box. And they were really ho-hum.
I got this way about HP calculators when I was in college which was a useless distraction. And later, when I was working as a tech and going around by motorcycle, I was this way about motorcycles. Wanting things overly badly isn't fun or nice, it just makes for unhappiness.
I was even this way regarding a classical guitar course I started at Orange Coast College. The teacher sold actual classical guitars, imported from Spain, that were very nice. They were not too expensive either. Right from the beginning I learned that classical guitar is designed to make things as easy for the player as possible, both in the guitar itself and in the way you learn to play. You don't need big hands or long fingers to play classical either. But instead of just buying one of the friendly little guitars and sitting with the crowd of students and working on my apoyando etc., no, I had to decide I was going to take one-on-one lessons from the teacher at his little private school, and get a mint-green Stratocaster instead of that humble little guitar. And so, I never learned guitar because I didn't just put my head down and work through the course with the kind of guitar the course needs, and gone through potentially 6 semesters of guitar teaching because you can take each semester twice and the teacher in fact encouraged it.
And this was back in the late 80s, inexpensive, good, college accredited guitar courses like that don't exist any more. Any kind of music education is $50/hour minimum now. The only thing I can think of that comes close in these days is, at the Buddhist study center next to the University of Hawaii at Manoa, there seem to be shakuhachi sessions/classes held 2X a week. I'm not sure if they even charge anything; they do require the student to have a shakuhachi of their own and that's it.
But getting back on-subject, I was a little kid and didn't know any better, and since American parenting involves teach the kid as little as possible and entirely avoiding morals or ethics, I've had to figure this all out much later on my own. I have no doubt the kids going to Buddhist school at the temple are being taught about these things from first grade on.
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