This morning I woke up at six-thirty (six-thirty!) to walk my friend’s dog and pick up its poop from the neighbor’s yard. Talk about my glorious life. (Don’t be jealous.) But really, it’s not like it was oh-my-gosh awful or anything. I mean, yeah, it was a little chilly, and I forgot to take a jacket. But the sun was up, the birds were chirping (as the dog was crapping), and spring was in full-bloom. Hell, I even saw a lady out running (running!). Apparently people do this–move, on purpose, with purpose, before seven.

Wonders never cease.

After a short walk with my friend’s dog (maybe twenty minutes?), I went back to bed. Passed out hard for four more hours. Well, not that hard. The dog woke me up several times. You know, they get excited and start barking about any ordinary old thing–passing cars, jumping bunny rabbits, the urge to urinate. My parents’ dog does this, goes absolutely bat-shit crazy every time someone walks by the front window. You think she’d never seen a Girl Scout before. Animals–it’s like everything is new to them.

Since waking back up, I’ve spent the day doing some odd-job work on my computer, as well as watching Netflix–Brene Brown (The Call to Courage) and John Mulaney (Kid Gorgeous at Radio City). John Mulaney was funnier. That being said, he IS a stand-up comedian. Brene Brown is a shame researcher and author. So it’s not really fair to compare them. But then again, life’s not fair.

Or so they say.

Last night and this afternoon I started reading and got through the bulk of Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Three Questions. (Ruiz wrote The Four Agreements. He has a thing with numbers.) And whereas I’m still processing the book as a whole, I’d like to briefly mention a couple things. One, Ruiz says that our memories are a tool we can use, that they should “teach, not torture us.” To me this means that memory can remind me that the stove can burn me and that certain people can too. It tells me, We’ve been down this road before, and it doesn’t end well. In this way, memory can be my teacher and serve its proper function. But when I’m using my memory to go over-and-over a horrific event, or replay something nasty someone said to me, or beat myself up for something I did twenty years ago, I’m misusing it.

Ruiz says we can likewise use our imaginations to help or harm us. That is, we can imagine how we’d like to decorate a room or where we’d like to take our lover to dinner, or we can just as easily imagine that we’re going to get sick and die or that someone (a friend or even a total stranger) hates us. Imagining something good is just as easy as imagining something bad. Well, maybe imagining something good is more difficult if you’ve had a lot of practice at imaging something bad, but, at least in theory, imagination, like memory, is simply a neutral tool, and we each get to decide how we want to use it.

I repeat–we each get to DECIDE how we want to use it.

Recently I read Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson, and Rick suggests the following exercise. First, center yourself. (He suggests closing your eyes, focusing on your breath, and simply noticing any sounds, thoughts, emotions, etc.) Then open your eyes and tell yourself, “I just arrived on the planet with a head full of ideas and memories to which I can give whatever importance I choose.”

I love this idea of just arriving on the planet five minutes ago. I “imagine” it’s what dogs and children must feel like–everything is new, bright, beautiful, and exciting. Honestly, I think it’s how we’d all see the world if we weren’t caught up in our heads, obsessing, worrying. But I also like the second part of the exercise, that we can CHOOSE (decide) what the ideas and memories in our heads mean. Recently I told my therapist about losing my cool with a camper at summer camp when I was seventeen and how I’ve felt bad about it ever since. “It sounds like you acted like a seventeen year old,” she said. “I’d let that go.” So I am. I’m moving the event from the “big deal” category in my head to the “that used to be a big deal, but it’s no longer a big deal, and I learned something from it” category. Because there’s no need to continue to punish myself in this present moment over something that’s, well, a figment of my imagination.