St. John, Zen, and Appreciation

I took Monday off this week. While driving my son to school, I was brooding, and recognized that I had been doing so for several days. On my drive back home, I realized: I'm depressed again.

This isn't uncommon: happens to me once or twice in a typical year, and lasts for a month or three. The last time it started, I began taking St. John's Wort, and noticed a quick improvement. Thus, I'm taking it again.

In addition, I decided to take up Zen again. It's something that's brought me peace in the past, and I do enjoy the "still mind" effect that it produces. I treated myself to two books on the subject. I'm reading " Everyday Zen" currently, and rather enjoying it.

Part of her process is listening to one's thoughts, and categorizing them. Some people think mostly about the future, some about the past, others about relationships, others about their insecurities. The author says it takes several years to get a good understanding of your own thought processes, but already I can see that I think about the future more than anything else: thing I can post on this blog, changes I can make to code, lessons I need to learn, looking forward to playing a game later... I've also come to realize that a very strong motivator for me (whether it's obvious or not) is to gain people's appreciation. I'm constantly looking for things to do that others will appreciate: this is not altruistic, mind you: it's because I like the feeling. It's a selfish thing (if it has positive benefits, so much the better). I think this is a fairly common trait among geeks: we like living on the technological edge, because we can point out "cool stuff" to our colleagues.