on Oura rings and semi-permanent things

i have a confession to make: i’ve started wearing an Oura ring. yes that’s right, one of those wearable devices which gives you grades like “Optimal”, “Good” and “Pay Attention“ for how you’re sleeping (among other things) and whose policy on data safekeeping and privacy I still don’t understand even after having combed through all the fine print.

I never saw myself as the type of person to use a wearable - I’m not particularly interested in quantifying and analyzing observations about my health - but on the other hand, I’ve never really seen myself as a “type of person” type of person either. the main impetus for my sudden interest in an Oura ring was reading about heart rate variability on twitter and how it’s apparently an important autonomic nervous system indicator of stress levels and emotional arousal, so I thought it’d be interesting to measure mine for awhile. That’s what first got me thinking about it, anyway.

then i realized that I’d missed the general feeling of wearing a ring on my fingers. lately as I’ve been writing I’ve noticed myself getting lost in the clouds inside my head, which manifests physically as a throbbing, sometimes achey sensation towards the top and front of my skull. I’ve begun looking for ways to gently remind myself to pay attention to the lower 7/8ths of my body, too. wearing a ring pulls you down into your hands by giving them something to tug at. i think of it as similar to the idea of a Totem from the movie Inception - a way to quickly guide me back to earth when i get abstracted away from it, as if in a dream.

the last time i wore a ring daily was during a brief stint in my 20s when I was engaged and subsequently married; i wore an engagement ring for about 12 months and a wedding ring for less time than that. as it was all falling apart I yearned for something besides cigarettes to fidget with so I experimented with different rings on all ten of my fingers - everything from garish costume jewelry to delicate gemstones to hand carved sterling silver pieces. in the end I wound up completely abandoning all rings.

Somewhere in the middle of last night, I woke myself up by yanking the Oura ring off my index finger; I was in the middle of a dream, perhaps, or subconsciously felt like it was choking me. when I woke up this morning, the ring was sitting on my middle finger instead of the index finger. according to my sleep tracker, this must’ve happened during one of my brief “awake” periods - either just before 2 am or sometime between 3:30 and 4am.

perhaps none of the above bodes well for the longevity of my Oura ring, but only time will tell! i am reserving my judgment for as long as possible (or at least up until the end of the 30 day grace period for returns).

Besides the new Oura ring and except on special occasions, the only jewelry I wear is this Guanyin bodhisattva necklace:

It was a present from my mother back in 2011, shortly after she had gotten back from her most recent trip to Taiwan and around the same time I married my ex. One of the many blessings which are associated with Guanyin is fertility. Far from being able to envision having children with my ex, I quickly hid the pink satin box she came in under layers of junk in one of the storage cabinets in our basement. I suppose it should have been an early sign of the trajectory of the marriage that I was so terrified of getting pregnant that not only did I simply not wear the fertility-boosting necklace, I buried it as far away from me as possible.

a few years later, after the divorce was finalized, my mom was at my house helping me prepare for a big move to another state. when she asked me why she never saw me wearing the Guanyin necklace, I told her the truth. Ah, said my mother: but Guanyin is good for so many other things. For instance: she protects people when they travel, and I had been travelling quite often for my job back then.

so i started wearing her around my neck circa 2013, and she has stayed around it pretty consistently ever since, tagging along with me on my cross-Atlantic move to Germany in 2018. Both Germans and Americans alike often compliment me on the necklace, but more than once I’ve realized that someone had mistaken her for the Virgin Mary. Before moving abroad I upgraded the chain for a rope style which I thought looked sturdier than the spiral one it came with, purchasing it from a mom-and-pop jewelry store owned by a Taiwanese family so I was pretty sure that my mother would approve. i wear the necklace all the time - when I sleep, when I shower and when I swim - same as I plan to do with the Oura ring, too. the only time I ever thought I’d lost my necklace was after a yoga practice in 2019, when I removed it because it was hitting my forehead during sun salutations and then left it absentmindedly behind in a corner on the floor after an especially blissful Savasana. Later on I e-mailed my teachers to ask if they had seen it and at first they said they hadn’t, then contacted me again hours later when they found it in the belly of their Roomba as they were emptying it.