Author Archives: Ben Casnocha

Quick Impressions of Paris, 2013 Edition

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Some quick, mostly banal impressions after a week spent hanging out with a couple good friends in Paris:

  • As a general point about travel, I prefer nature and outdoors to old buildings, churches, and museums. I am in awe when absorbing a tremendous nature scene, whereas being in the presence a church with great historical meaning doesn’t do much for me. But still, it’s hard to complain about Paris as a city. It’s an A-list destination for a reason: beautiful, functional, full of pretty people, and super easy to get around in.
  • Everything felt small for my oversized body. The chairs at the cafes, the tables at the cafes, the hotel rooms, the apartments, the cars, the sidewalks.
  • The trip was primarily about spending time with two friends. To that end, I arranged few meetings or other commitments, which allowed me to stay on Pacific Time while there — my friend (from New York) and I went to bed at 4 or 5 AM, and woke up at around 12 noon. I experienced basically no jet lag when I came back.
  • A highlight was going for runs along the Seine river listening to music on my iPod — so beautiful, so relaxing.
  • The Airbnb apartment in the heart of Saint Germaine worked out well. It was my first Airbnb rental as a traveler; I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Bottom Line: Paris in the spring is totally easy. An excellent mini-vacation spending quality time with good friends.

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Quote of the Day

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“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” – E.B. White

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Book Discussion: “Future Perfect” by Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson is one of my favorite authors. I’ve blogged about his various books several times; I’ve read them all.

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in a Google Hangout discussion with Steven and a handful of other commentators to discuss his new book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. The full hour discussion is below and on YouTube. (BTW: Google Hangout group discussions work pretty well — I’ll be doing more of them.)

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The Skill Developed in Meditation

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I enjoyed this clear description:

Meditation is basically a training method for your mind. When certain things happen to you, your mind generates a certain response whether it be happiness, frustration, anger ect. The way your mind has been inculcated is the path of least resistance and the path it wants to take, and will take unless you know how to mitigate it. Meditation teaches you how and makes it easier to override the process. Who is doing the overriding of this process? Well, that’s the million dollar question. But I digress.

So here’s what I’m getting at: if meditation is too easy, you’re doing something wrong. You might be getting yourself really relaxed, but is it possible that’s all you’re doing? Not saying it is. I don’t know, just throwing some ideas out there and it’s up to you to see if any seem to fit your situation.

But as you meditate, your mind wants to grab onto the thoughts and not your breath. The course of least resistance is away from your breath and back into whatever thoughts are vying for your attention. Every time you go back to the breath, you train or teach yourself even, to take the opposite of the path of least resistance. This is coupled with the fact that half the time when you meditate, your mind says, “I’m tired. Stop concentrating on the breath and just kick back and let a guided meditation do most of the work.” But every time this comes up you learn to drop it by returning to the breath and not listening to the thought no matter how loud and powerful it can get.

When you first start meditating you have this thought and then come back to the breath. But there’s still a trace of this thought floating around in your mind and eventually it pulls you in again. As soon as you realize your back in that thought again, you turn your awareness back to the breath and away from the thought. But then it pulls you in again. And then you drop it again. You do this over and over and over. But as you practice you get better and better and faster and faster at recognizing it. You start to figure out how to do it most efficiently and quickly, seeing and dropping thoughts before they even become thoughts at all.

After doing this hour after hour, you gain a skill. One day you realize that you don’t have to be sitting on a cushion to use this skill. I can’t really explain how it’s done, but it’s just something you learn from continually focusing, coming back to, and holding your attention on the breath. It’s like if you ever do a lot of push-ups, eventually you will realize, “I can flex my pecs.” You couldn’t flex them before, and you don’t really know how you learned to do it, but now you can just do it.

(Hat tip to Andy McKenzie)

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Audiobook Review: This is How You Lose Her

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Junot Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and professor at MIT. He also speaks English with a native Dominican accent. These two facts make his latest novel, This is How You Lose Her, an unusually good choice for audiobook.

The stories, which surround the life of a Dominican man at different points in his life, are well-written. They are on themes of infidelity, friendship, love found, and love lost. There are sentences like “The half-life of love is forever.” When Diaz speaks these sentences on the audiobook from the perspective of the man, he does so with intensity — especially when it’s a lewd reference or expletive. There are probably a dozen Spanish sentences scattered throughout, and Dominican musical beats separating each chapter.

You can listen to a sample on Audible.com. Here’s the Amazon hardcover link.

So far, my algorithm for listening to audiobook (vs. print or e-book) has been “something I probably won’t need to reference later.” This recent experience has led me to modify that criteria: I’ll also seek audiobook when it’s read by someone with a voice that truly upgrades the reading experience in authentic way.

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One other point on audiobooks: I’m buying CDs now for the car because it’s too damn hard to download MP3s and sync across iTunes and control the start/stop functions while also using phone’s GPS. Old school works.

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