It’s a weekend again, I wrote the first post of this series on the 14th of March, that’s 9 Saturdays ago.
As I was meditating this morning an idea I had before came back, about the concept of the two minds: there’s the “thinking mind”, which keep sweeping us away all the time, and there’s the “observing mind”, through which can see the thinking mind and which we develop with our meditation practice.
Well, here’s my idea: I think of the “observing mind” as running a top command in a terminal window (or the Activity Monitor utility), when I can focus on my observing mind I can see my thoughts starting and stopping, taking more or less resources, and when necessary I can kill them (or “let them go”, in meditation parlance). Next time any of my nerdy friends will try meditating, you can use this visualisation.
I had two deliveries this week. I ordered some pipe tobacco from the Black Swan Shoppe somewhere up in Yorkshire, and it arrived via Royal Mail in 24 hours. Fantastic.
Then on Wednesday I ordered a Pizza from Santa Maria (a local restaurant which happens to make one of the best pizza in London). Since it’s local I had never had it delivered. Between the moment I hit “order” button on the Deliveroo app and the photo below only 9 minutes passed. Amazing!
This week I finished watching Ricky Gervais’ After Life (excellent). I also watched Jerry Seinfeld’s latest special on Netflix (good, perhaps not his best).
At this point I had to go back and watch again Talking Funny, an old HBO show which is just Gervais, Seinfeld, Louis CK and Chris Rock talking shop for 50 minutes. If you like standup comedy and haven’t seen this, add it to your playlist.
Speaking of comedians, I caught a few bits of the Prime Minister Question Time this week, it was the first time for the recovered Boris Johnson in front of the new leader of the opposition Kier Starmer. I don’t have a dog in this fight (I’m in a situation of “taxation without representation), but I did find interesting to see Boris in an empty chamber struggling in front of what looked for the first time as an adult asking questions that needed to be asked.
Yesterday it was VE Day, the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany surrender at the end of WWII. Oddly this one is not celebrated very much in Italy (of course it isn’t… we lost), it was interesting to see how the celebration of a victory looks like. Spitfires flew, the Queen spoke again, and then everybody singed “We’ll meet again”.
That’s all for now. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.