Adventures In Meditation

Until late December, I'd never meditated. I'd been a longtime supporter of mediative THINGS—walking, gardening, cooking. But, let's be clear, meditative is not meditating.

Meditation is really hard! Have you tried it? Do you agree? It forces you to reckon with your total mess of a brain. As a child of the 80s, I went to swimming lessons and piano class—but no one ever taught me how to control my thoughts and emotions. This is a thing. A skill you can hone through hours and days and weeks of, just, sitting and focusing. Who would've thought, as you get older, that the secret to life is not in adding things—knowledge, skills, experience, friends—but rather in taking things away, stripping down existence to its very simplest form.

Anyway, I'm terrible at it. Like a tot with training wheels, I'm doing guided meditations that I've downloaded to my phone. My favorite  is the one where you simply sit and focus on the space between your thoughts. The SPACE! It's expansive. On good days, I can rise right up into it. Eventually, perhaps when I'm all gray, perhaps when I'm living atop a Tibetan peak, I'll be able to turn my mind on and off at will. Mind control. How cool.

Anyway, daily meditation is not glamorous. It's another thing on the to-do list. Plus my knees always hurt after I sit there for a while. Still, the work is important—as necessary as eating and sleeping. And later, when the stress runs high and the world roils, I've got a surefire way to dial it all down.