4. Automatic

In addition to implanting an earworm of the Pointer Sisters' song AUTOMATIC into your head—today, Aubrey discusses how low-stakes activities and things we do 'automatically' require more of our attention and have more impact on our lives than we may realize. 

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TRANSCRIPT

And welcome to Aubrey the Podcast. 

Today I talk about the idea of something being automatic, breathing, meditation, and the idea of mental hygiene. 

Wow. I kept it fairly concise for me. 

Anyway, let's go.

So I just spent 38 minutes changing the color of the folder icons on my desktop. It just dawned on me, “Why are the folders always this color blue, and how do I change them?” 

At which point, I Googled, went down the Google hole, read a tutorial or two, and spent 38 minutes choosing a new color for all the folders on my desktop.

The 38 minutes was spent playing with the slider. Deciding whether I wanted to look at lavender folders or bright indigo, cobalt blue, and the pros and cons of each. And after I finished, I thought, “Why do we spend time doing things that don't matter? 

And the fact of the matter is, I think it matters. I think doing things like that are really important.

Maybe how we defined what doesn't matter or so-called worthless activities have to be reevaluated. 

Values. I think our values are off because the, and I know this, I know that in the scheme of things, it's not important, but it, it feels like doing something like I just did—and the feeling I get afterward is what tells me that that was somehow a worthwhile activity.

In the scheme of my like daily physical or mental health, like it brought some well-being to some level of how I feel today. I mean, theoretically, I got something out of that, and I'm just trying to figure out what that is. It's a seemingly meaningless exercise. 

[Sorry, that's my dog drinking from the shower over there.]

So what did I get out of it? 

And I think this applies too, I think this applies to most pointless, relaxing, procrastinating, distractions that we engage in. 

So first and foremost, I got relaxation. I got relaxation from doing a low-stakes activity. And I think low-stakes activities are really important.

They're the R&R; they're the rest and recovery, the rest and relaxation, it's like, uh, you know, the dim to the full bright switch. 

They allow us to preserve energy. 

What else did I get? 

I got visual stimulation. I created order and beauty on my desktop, something I look at every single day.

I found it soothing and satisfying. I got to use my aesthetic sense. I created balance and harmony in a visual. You know, the palette that I look at all the time. I mean, it does go directly to your brain, what we look at. 

Beauty is important. Balance is important. Aestheticism, you know, we all have sort of different wiring for how much beauty and balance and harmony soothes and calms and creates.

I think it's a healing effect, actually. So I just did an exercise that created some sort of harmony and balance. , which went straight to my brain because, ooh, I got a little shot of something when I looked at my desktop. After I was done, I had a sense of playing, you know, playing with the color, playing with the slider, experimenting, playing with my preferences.

So think it's important that we let ourselves play and do things that feel irrelevant and not just relevant things. So that we allow ourselves to deviate from goal-focused paths of activity. I think it's important because it feels more natural, feels, makes life feel more like a walk in the woods. Or more like when, I mean what occurs to me, like I used to just do hairstyles when I was little for the heck of it.

Or you draw on a napkin, not because you have an idea, because there's a napkin there, or you decide to rearrange your toys or, I don't know, draw something in the ground with a stick or drag a stick and see the wiggly line that it makes. These are irrelevant activities and something. Not being goal-focused allows the imagination to sort of oof and look; here I am talking about something.

I was sort of talking about life and thinking about the balance of wellbeing, all because I sat there and used color sliders and decided to change the look of my, my desktop. So yeah, we need to live life a little more naturally. I. And that is a, it's a, it's an odd way of bringing nature in, but maybe it's, yeah.

I don't know. I love the word meander. Meander is the word that really described when I was going through one of my Feng Shui trainings, like the path, the walkway to the house. Or an apartment building or, or some sort of entrance. It's ideal if that path meanders and winds its way towards the entry rather than a straight shot right in, because that's, that's what happens in nature.

Paths wind around trees or rivers meander through the landscape. I use that in when I look at an apartment or any sort of space and flow; you can look at it and say, "Is the energy meandering through the space? Is it hitting walls or squeezing itself through tight spaces? Or does it just sort of puddle, and there are no objects to make it meander?”

It just blew like a big open gallery space. 

I think activity has to go like that too. Has to meander—our activities and behavior need to meander to feel natural. So, all right. 

I would love to hear other ways other people think this applies to, because I know it applies to everything. 

It applies to how we heal. You know, healing happens in a rather meandering way. There's a model of, or a di, not a model, but a diagram, pictogram something. Let's call it an illustration of how we heal and we heal in waves, right? We don't just go getting better, we feel better and dip down rest because healing takes energy and effort.

The body heals and fixes something and then it has to rest, and while it's resting, it sort of falls back a little bit and we think, oh no, it's back again. But then we, we go up a little bit higher, the next phase of healing. I think productivity is like that too. It's probably why people love working from home at least part of the time after getting a taste.

because when you're in an office, you really have to manipulate to create excuses or ways to not just be a productivity train. All right? I hope your days are, you can work in some, some ways to meander through your workday or your parenting day, which is a workday all of your days. I think it affects time, too, our perception of time anyway.

So I was thinking about this concept of automatic—automatic processes, and the reason I was thinking about it was because somebody used the idea of mental hygiene…is kind of blowing my mind, which means I'm gonna have to clean it up. 

Mental hygiene. Now I think I probably heard that. Phrase over the past few decades here and there, but I heard it more seriously in the last year.

And so I was thinking that maybe I'd talk about this concept of automatic, the word ‘automatic.’ And so I think we need to think more about what we call automatic. 

And then, after we think about what we call automatic, I think we need to think about the word automatic and what we really mean by that, and how we relate to things that we call automatic.

Like how do we relate to them? My sense is that we don't relate to automatic things with any kind of sense of responsibility until. They break down or until they go toxic or go crazy, like a transformer gone nuts. You know, some examples are just basic functions in your body. Your heart beats automatically.

We breathe automatically. 

We have an automatic, I don't know why they call it autonomic—I’ll have to look that up, but it's automatic. We have an automatic nervous system. 

We think thoughts kind of automatically. Certain thoughts, random thoughts. 

We have automatic reflexes, and so all of these things are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s automatic. Until we have a major problem with it… 

…like our artery is clogged and our heart has problems beating, or there's a defect that we discover and that automatic function gets disrupted, or our breathing gets impeded, or our car breaks down on the highway, and it doesn't start. What used to be automatic with the button all of a sudden, and so I feel like the idea of something being automatic isn't coupled enough with the idea of our responsibility to maintain what's automatic.

In fact, I'm starting to feel like anything that's automatic demands more of our attention more of the time. Because the things and the components and the events and the circumstances that automatic processes rely on can be intricate and subtle, we don't do intricate and subtle automatically very well.

So all of this kind of popped into my head because I've been diving back into my meditation practice. And truly really trying to have a meditation practice that's consistent and routine. And I'd like to reap the benefits of being consistent in my practice. So I was talking to my meditation teacher, who is a bit newer to me, who I completely respect, and he's got an admirable intellect where his ideas are very well developed.

He's also gentle, but not, you know, he's not a wet blanket. His name's Thom Knowles. He's very well known, and I was talking to him about Vedic meditation, which, you know, one is supposed to do 20 minutes twice a day, every single day. And so I asked him, I said, well, because I forget everything. I'll forget to meditate.

I forgot this morning, and I will try not to forget this evening. And so I asked him, I said, “So, do people remember to meditate? How do I remember? Because I forget everything. As soon as I dig myself into a concentration hole, it is fairly certain that I am forgetting something. Like now—I’m probably forgetting something.

So I sort of was hoping that he would say, “Well, you know, you just do the best you can Aubrey. You just…some days you forget, or some days you're too busy. Some days you're just caught up in life, and then you just get back on it the next day.” 

I was hoping it was like vitamins that you could skip a day. No harm, no foul. 

And that is not what he said. Instead, he said, “You make meditation non-negotiable.” 

I was like, “What? You make it non-negotiable, like brushing your teeth?” 

I didn't want to tell him that sometimes that's negotiable late at night, especially if everyone's out of town. But no, I didn't say that. And I understand the concept, and I do take care of my teeth as a non-negotiable activity.

But when he said non-negotiable, I was… First of all, it implied the seriousness of this thing we do called meditation. 

He went on to describe something called mental hygiene and said it will be inconceivable in the future that we don't clean our minds. I don't know if he used this exact word, but this is pretty close to what he said. 

He said it will be inconceivable in the future that we don't glean our minds twice a day, every day.

We all get personal hygiene, but mental hygiene? I was like, “Whoa. This is just about the most obvious thing that I've literally never thought of.” 

The idea of cleaning out your mind, the debris and all the noise and stimulation and all that stuff in there, and the stress and, yeah, I'm on board with that, that our minds are not just some automatic functioning machines.

So I guess what I'm trying to describe or go a little bit deeper into is that, sure, something may seem automatic, but nothing is automatic forever. We are made in a certain way where we are automatic until we stop taking care of a part of us. For example, if we stop taking care of our liver by throwing all sorts of toxic substances into our bodies, the liver breaks down.

Sometimes it's not intentional, and we have to take extra care of it. Same with the heart, same with every single part. If we smoke, same with the lungs, or if we know that we're being bombarded, not. By our own doing. It's the debris; it's the toxicity; it's the stuff of the day. And if there's anything that gets bombarded through no fault of its own and through some fault of our own, we're a lot of fault of our own.

You know, the mind needs cleaning. And meditation is the thing that does that, and that was the first time I ever truly understood meditation as something that was not an opt-in. I couldn't opt in because I was trying to be an extra good hippie or a really pure person that day until Tuesday when I would have a quesadilla.

Then I'd go back and do yoga and meditation on Thursday to make up for the quesadilla on Tuesday. So I have this opt-in mindset about meditation, and it's not aligned with my aspirations, but it's not like I aspire to take care of my teeth. I don't aspire to take care of my organs.

The brain is no different. The brain runs the whole nervous system. So anyway, I wanted to share this idea that we need to change this relationship to this word automatic and think of things that we call automatic as things that need extra care, not no care, or almost to the point of ignoring.

Think about an automatic weapon, for Pete's sake. It needs more care so that it doesn't go off. It's more damaging. Things that are automatic and that break down are really hard to replace or diagnose. Suppose it's like cleaning an engine that's been ignored; gotta take the whole thing apart. It's easier to change your oil or to drive well; you're not stressing the gears.

Whatever it is. I do not know how a car runs, but I know those basic things. You wanna maintain automatic processes. So it just dawned on me that if I talk about it and think about it more, maybe I'll appreciate that the brain is one of those complex processes. The mind, not the brain, the mind, the mind, the mind needs clean.

Doesn't it? It does. 

And meditation is the thing. I don't think it matters what kind of meditation. But anyway—consistency. 

Consistency. 

All right. If I say it out loud, I'll do it. I'll let you know. 

Okay. 

Bye.