Week 1 for Zanna: Use Your Nondominant Hand

For Christmas this year, my dear friend and work spouse, Juliet, gave me a book. Cool. I like books. Books are good. As I started looking at it I thought, Huh. Is this a self-help book? What is she trying to say?  She explained that she saw this book, and thought of me... um, great?  Then she said, it had an exercise in mindfulness for every week of the year.  Oh, well that's fine. Short reading fun for the bathroom.  And THEN she said she got a copy for herself and we should do these practices together throughout the year.  Greeeaaaat... well... maybe it'll get forgotten.  But as I thought some more and discussed it with another friend who said, "You NEED to do this. And blog it. So I can read it."  I started thinking, this could be fun.
So I talked to J. She agreed to blog with me from her perspective as well, as long as I gave it a real chance. So here I am. Giving it a real chance. We'll see how it goes.  The dual blogging aspect will give us some accountability for both updating this blog and for actually going through all 53 of the exercises. I haven't read ahead... OK, that's not true, I flipped to a section that was something about "Really look at your hand" and was afraid I'd have to figure out how to score some drugs... but other than that, I'll discover these challenges week by week.
Since this is the first post, I'm giving some background as well as the lessons learned from week one.  I'm a skeptic. And a cynic. I don't buy into things that can only be sensed and not verified by science (this is not to say that there aren't things science can't explain yet... there are more of those than we know, but I don't leap from: "I don't understand it" to "It must be mystical"). The mind will play tricks on you, so apply some logic and reason, and I'll take it under advisement. 

Exercise One: Use your nondominant hand for some ordinary tasks each day.

The book tells you you can choose something like brushing teeth, or combing hair... I got started late, because I'm slack and was still not completely on board, so I decided to go with something complicated. Juliet pointed out that that's typically my way anyway: pick the most complicated thing and go for it.  I chose to do my daily sudoku, jumble, and crossword puzzles in the newspaper (yes, I still get print newspaper, specifically because I like to do my daily puzzles, it helps me think).

My first thoughts on this task are #$)(*#$)_@*#()@)*#@)(()Q@#*%!!!!  (I think that's cartoon speak for something not altogether family friendly)  My husband laughed at me a lot during this week. A few years ago, he broke his right arm and was forced to do everything as a lefty... not just as a lefty, but a one armed lefty... so I should suck it up and work through it.

Patience? Yeah, yeah, yeah... How long does that take?

The book suggests that it has something to do with what Zen masters call "Beginner's Mind" that my right hand has 39 years of experience, whereas my left hand has 2-3... Whatever. As I continued working the puzzles, the second thing that I thought was I feel dumb.  And, no, not "I feel dumb" for doing this experiment... but I was having real difficulty solving the puzzles with my left hand.  I discovered that normally, there is almost no lag time between thinking something and being able to write it, but with my left hand I have to stop. Stop, think about the answer, if it's a word-how to spell it, figure out  if it works with the other words around it (painstakingly, because I couldn't hold each word in my head to check when my brain was trying to figure out how to write)... things I already did semi-consciously.  VERY frustrating.  Lots of puzzles didn't get done last week.

Yeah. I get it.