2/25/24

 Sunday, February 25, 2024

In bed around 10 (?), up at 1:30 for pit stop, back to bed until 2:30 but unable to sleep due to shoulder/wrist pain, up again at 3:30.  29°, high of 50°, mostly cloudy day ahead.  The wind is SSW aat 15 mph, 6-15/28.  Sunrise at 6:34, sunset at 5:35, 11+0.  I let Lilly out at 3:10.

Caila will be here for dinner tonight.

Treadmill; pain.   It's been a painful day.  I can't manage the first shoulder stretch again, wondering whether that stretch worsens the pain.

I'm grateful for PBS and Public Radio.

Aware: Glimpses of Consciouness  Last night, Geri and I watched again this documentary from the Independent Lens series on Milwaukee PBS.  We had watched much of it the night before but we both fell asleep and resolved to watch it again last night.  Consciousness is perhaps Nature's greatest mystery.  Where does it come from?  For that matter, where does Life come from?  What were the first entities on Earth that were living, having the properties of movement, sensitivity, reproduction, growth, etc?  What living things have consciousness, awareness and awareness or awareness?  Where did 'livingness' and 'consciousness' come from?  The easiest answer is: God, but that leads to other unanswerable questions and for non-believers and agnostics, it's no answer.  When did consciousness evolve, if it did, and which animals (or other creatures) have it?  All of these questions are fascinating mysteries but I was especially interested in what I might learn from the sections of the program that featured Buddhism and meditation practices but I didn't learn much from those parts.  Nonetheless, I continue to believe, or hope, that there is much to learn from the practices of mindfulness and meditation, and from Buddhism generally and its outgrowth, Zen.  The physical pain I have been experiencing for some time now has interfered with my readings in these areas and with my beginner's practices.  Actually, it interferes with everything, like a spoiled, selfish child demanding demanding my attention only on him,

My international readership.  The application/web site (what is it?) independent.academia.edu sent me an email today informing me that Zakaria HADRAOUI of Morocco " read your paper, "Uncle Bob": Introductory Remarks to the Inaugural Robert F. Boden Lecture".  "Uncle Bob" was a speech I gave on February 11, 1997, 27 years ago, published at 81 Marquette Law Review 5 (1997).  I wonder how this academic website knows that Messr. Hadraoui read my speech/article and, more interesting, WHY he would read it.