Smart Pencils

by Ron Lauderbach

I keep hundreds of pencils I picked up off the ground during my teaching career in a PF Flyer shoebox, under my bed. They wait for a colorful slip-on eraser I attach when I bring one back to life.   My found pencils are not rookies from a yellow Ticonderoga box, but seasoned veterans, bearing bite-marks and other scars—proof of lives lived. Many are surprised by my electric   sharpener, a device that did not exist when they were dropped. Some have art class paint on them and others grease from auto-shop. I have one that says Oscar loves written on its roundness, but the name of Oscar’s lover   has been sharpened away. I like to write with my found pencils. I believe they impart wisdom from their past lives. A lot of pencils advertise businesses and institutions, many of which are   gone forever. I have one pencil with a student’s name I remember on it, in my car, in case I ever see him around town. I have some ink pens too, but dry—unable to reveal secrets.

__________

From Snapshots, Kelsay Books, 2022, RON LAUDERBACH.

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

A field of conscious presence or You cannot lose something that you are

“Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself. Eckhart Tolle

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world. Gabor Maté

 “A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide. Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work.

We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours.

 “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past...Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.’Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction  

Protect a Deep Work Block Every Day

Before you open email, before you check messages, before you respond to anything: protect a block of time — ideally 90 minutes to two hours — for your most cognitively demanding work. Schedule it as you would an important meeting, at the same time each day. Research on circadian rhythms and prefrontal cortex function suggests that for most people, the first two to four hours after waking represent peak executive capacity. This is the window to protect most aggressively. Everything else — email, meetings, administrative tasks — should be pushed to the afternoon wherever possible.

Your Attention Isn't Broken

It's being harvested. Here's the neuroscience of what's actually happening — and the architecture that fixes it.

Dr. Judy Ho

May 20, 2026

 

If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing. ―Dōgen

Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

― Dōgen

No matter how bad a state of mind you may get into, if you keep strong and hold out, eventually the floating clouds must vanish and the withering wind must cease. ―Dōgen

Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered. Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions.

― Zen Master Dōgen 

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? ― Dogen

To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfections. ―Dōgen

 

“That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. 

But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger. 

I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay. The woman who appears to me when I meditate, in her soft, baggy clothes—she isn’t quite the same as a parent, and she never will be. But she takes me into her arms and whispers, “I want to love you.” I lean in and let her.”

― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma page 231

The drug dealers are back and they are attracting a parade of addicted misfits. Mother's Day was a demented circus, a steady stream of drug addled humans teetering in the parking lot, terrifying everyone. The neighbors have been complaining to me over the fence, There's a woman living in the car! She was nodding off at 5AM! Yesterday when we came out with the dogs at 4:45AM, my husband was looking up at the Mars and Saturn. The dealer hidden in his car thought we were looking at him and he jumped out to identify himself. It's creepy and unsettling. We are all rattled. Every day we don't know what we're going to see when we pull into the shared parking lot. The daily zombie apocalypse. As long as the landlords get their rent money, they do not care.

It's not a waste if you are learning