Sudoku, or pseudo cue

To my own amazement, I have become something of a sudoku freak. I now almost religiously end my day by eagerly tackling a puzzle or two, and find myself constantly scouting for another book so I don't run out.

What makes this amazing, at least to me, is that as a wordwright in love with language, I've always been a crossword kid. Not much is as delightful as a cup of coffee with a chance to scramble from five across to sixty down. I loved it when a friend told me the reigning puzzlesmith, Will Shortz, gave a speech in her town saying the beauty of crossword puzzles is the depth of knowledge they require you to plumb: you have to have learned a lot--art, history, science--to fill in eight down and thirty across. You have to know stuff. But, intelligence and memory aren't necessary for sudoku, he said. Anybody with a pencil can do it because it requires no foreplay of knowledge. It's just plain single digit number manipulation.

Actually for me that was the point. Since I suffer from numeric dyslexia and can't push numbers around without reversing or inadvertently repeating them, I thought maybe some easy sudoku could help me sharpen my focus, my familiarity with numbers, and make me less dysfunctional with basic checkbook math and telephone contacts. And, yes, I succumbed to all that hype about how playing with these puzzles could sharpen an aging brain.

I bought a small book of easy puzzles and had at it, one a day or many on a plane. Sadly, my numeric dyslexia echoed back at me continually, with errors like three 3s in the same line. Boy, am I handicapped, I told myself and tried to persevere with this necessary remedy. I loved the bingo! high of getting a whole puzzle right, even if it was just for babies.

Maybe it was curiosity or maybe that devil in me. Before long I started flipping through my book, and peeking at the "hard" or "expert" puzzles further back. I even took a stab or two at them but these were seriously frustrating. And really, life is frustrating and humiliating enough that I didn't need to volunteer for more in bed with a puzzle book. My trigger finger stayed on the answer page, ready to pull it into view. But every once in a blue moon, I actually solved a hard puzzle without it. My exuberance hit the page as a huge star with an exclamation mark scrawled across the squares. Naturally, I wanted more...now that I knew I could do it.

That's how I become obsessed with solving the "challenging" or "expert" or "hard" sudoku puzzles --one a night before I go to bed. I told myself I was really sharpening my aging brain and curing my dyslexia--my very own self help improvement program. But last week I finally realized I am addicted to these number puzzles as outrageous d.i.y. Dharma practice. They teach me how to tackle and defuse frustration. Because I am determined to succeed and scrawl my star!, I've developed astonishing patience for solving the problem set out by the rules. I take my methodical time. I strategize all sorts of skillful means for lining everything up harmoniously in its proper place and thrill when something turns out to solve the sudoku. It's so gratifying to scrawl that star! as a reward for my own laborious effort.

In other words, I am religiously spending lots of time safely developing problem solving skills and the patience to deploy them. I find myself now entering emotionally unsafe human and work situations as though all those involved are sudoku numbers that have to be fit into their proper cube by my skillful strategy. And every night I tackle another sudoku puzzle to remember how to do it this new way: calmly, generously, open mindedly--the way the Buddha would want. Who knew sudoku had this in it?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Impermanence in the land of steak and potatoes

Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking, was released last week with a flourish of signing/speaking events. The enthusiasm for this little book has been startling, all the more so because it spans generations: from college students to the patrician grandmother of a college student. "My granddaughter spent two weeks with us and the whole time she cooked us vegetarian meals that were surprisingly delicious. When she left, she told us we should eat more this way and I just know your book is going to help me," she said.

Being a Dharma book, Veggiyana is garnished only with vegetarian recipes, 108 of them gathered from around the planet. So it seems to bring up the question of meat eating. Surprisingly, many people are struggling with this, trying to make their way through a briar thicket of habit, morals and need. They want to know if they should go "cold turkey" or if it's wrong to eat meat once in a while or eat fish or what. Factory farms, faulty regulation, the diabetes epidemic and the new loud drumbeat of publicity about them seem to have put the ethical issue on speed dial. What wonderful impermanence.

There is of course no one or right answer. Even the Buddha knew that and his equivocation was maddening. So all I say is, there is right effort, right intention. Upon inadvertently witnessing a chicken being slaughtered for his first meal in India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama instantly went full tilt vegetarian and ended up in a hospital. So I have to say it's probably best to hasten slowly, surely, keeping your awareness well honed. I've found the more I myself can stay aware of animals as fellow beings suffering in this life too, the less I want to eat them, and the less I do. But as one woman confessed to me last night: "I was a vegetarian for 38 years and now every so often I just want to eat a cheeseburger, so I do."

Our bodies evolved eating animal protein so we still have that need. One way to fulfill it,probably the oldest trick in the book, is to simply stop eating slabs of roast beef and quarters of chicken and whole lobsters and just use tiny bits to flavor the rest of your food. Last week for example, I discovered that three thin slices of pepperoni diced into fine bits could delightfully flavor corn chowder for three. The whole point is that every time you reduce your demand one way or another, you reduce the slaughter you want to prevent and move closer toward your personal goal.

One or two people proudly told me they were vegetarian but they do eat fish. Yikes. When I asked them where was the difference between not eating one creature but eating another, they were stunned. And then downright disheartened when I said that many Buddhists, particularly Tibetans, will categorically not eat fish because fish are silent and cannot scream to reveal their pain when we kill them. This strikes them as extreme cruelty as does, say, eating 12 clams for one meal. So there are no easy outs or answers.

One young woman asked me what I thought about veganism. I thought this was a loaded question. I stalled by telling her the Buddha wasn't vegan and that I'd once read a book by an Oxford don about veganism used as extreme religious and political heresy. And then it hit me, a connection I'd missed. It's been the non-vegans who actually saved the cow from extinction by recognizing its uniquely precious ability to turn solar and plant energy into valuable protein, giving us a necessary nutrient so we don't have to kill for it. In other words, realizing that milk, butter, cheese and yogurt are life giving to us, gave life to the cow. Wouldn't have happened in a vegan world.

But it turned out, I didn't have to go that far. Having been diagnosed as malnourished, this woman gave it up for plain old vegetarianism-- the usual denouement, I hear. Veganism is not nutritionally sustainable without a lot of supplemental tricks and equipment like iron pots and tea kettles. A little butter on your bread is not going to bring the world to an end. It certainly beats caviar or salmon paté. We have to try to look at our choices that way.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Lost and Found

A year ago I wrote about my friend who had adopted three Sudanese siblings so that after the horrors they'd witnessed and survived, they could stay together as a family. Last week I got to spend time with my friend and her youngest "child", Adut, who is 15 and already 5'9" tall. I want to share the beautiful news.

As I said earlier, my friend is raising Adut pretty much from scratch. As one of the "lost children of Sudan", she got out with only her budding life, no skills whatever at all. She was illiterate and couldn't count or cook. My friend likes to say all the limelight was put on the 200 or so lost boys, thanks to Dave Eggers' bestselling book, but there were also 89 girls and nobody noticed them because females don't much count for anything in much of Sudanese, read that Islamic, society. Adut and her siblings came from the south, where people were massacred merely because they were, like her family, Christian. As a Chinese woman once said to me: "I can't understand how people can kill each other over an idea when there are so many ideas in the world."

Thanks to the extraordinary compassion--and finances--of my friend today Adut is a seemingly normal teenager. She has braces, she is reading the Twilight series and is mesmerized by the movie versions, she's playing sports at school and she just loves ice cream. She also loves her faithful but frisky black lab, now one-year-old, whom she named "Addie."

Me being me the food finder, I asked Adut if she ate Ful, the stewed fava bean dish beloved by Egyptians, Libyans, Ethiopians and Somali. Once we cleared up what I meant, she brightened noticeably. "Yes, sometimes we did," she said. I asked her to tell me about other Sudanese dishes. She told me her sister made really good injeera, the spongy flat bread I discovered not that long ago as the basis of an Ethiopian meal. The Sudanese like the Ethiopians use this not only as a plate and sauce absorber, but the way to get food into their mouth. They break off pieces and mop. I noticed however that Adut didn't have any trouble using the knife and fork for my dinner offerings. She had lovely table manners.

Adut was so delighted that I knew something about her world, she invited me to go to her sister's house in Boston to have some Sudanese food. And when I produced a can of Congo peas, aka pigeon peas, from my pantry and asked if she knew these, an enormous smile lit up her pitch black face and she hugged me. That's what I love about food: it's so primal, common and joyous. We all share it; eating, we are all one.

I'm headed to Boston next week for book signing events and Adut was really happy to know I'm going to be staying at "her" house, even though she'll probably be really busy with homework and stuff. My friend makes sure she has full time access to a therapist, tutors and via her own smartphone, her sister and brother. So there it is: wisdom, compassion and skillful means. One of those lost children of Sudan has been found and liberated from suffering.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, ReligionThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved