Recollecting Impermanence

Hello, Readers. Since last I wrote, the beloved pooch has died. This is terribly sad, and I notice his absence everywhere, for example when I wake up and no longer have to step over a large, sleeping dog. Or when I peel a carrot, and I realize he is not waiting patiently on the doormat for me to toss him the ends. It’s sad and we are all grieving, and yet it was inevitable that we would outlive him, barring unforseen circumstances.To avoid this situation, I would have had to adopt a tortoise, I suppose, but they’re not much good for midday walks. 

Impermanence has, therefore, been on my mind. The truth of impermanence is one of those truths to which we pay lip service. We know life is short, and that change is the only certainty in life, but we usually only know it theoretically, or intellectually, not in a bone-deep way. Yet knowing the deep truth of impermanence is key to appreciating what’s happening right now. Understanding impermanence is the doorway to wisdom, so they say. They, in this case, being Buddhist teachers. 

Buddhist philosophy feels impermanence is so important that everyone, layperson or monk, should contemplate it daily in the form of the five daily remembrances. They are as follows:

1. Just like everybody, I am of the nature to experience illness. I cannot avoid sickness
2. Just like everybody, I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot avoid aging. 
3. Just like everybody, I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. 
4. I am the owner of and heir to all my actions. 
5. I must be separated and parted from all that is dear and beloved to me.

Those last two are listed in different order, depending on the translation.

—Upajjhatthana Sutta 

I’m not going to lie, these seem like a bummer. Number five is really hard to take, these days. I lost an earring down the bathroom sink the other day. I swear that thing committed harakiri, because otherwise there is no explanation. Unless it is that my ear holes have stretched and sagged along with everything else on my person? But I mean maybe the earring disappeared to get me to pay attention to the blog post I’ve delayed writing for days. Was this not karma showing me the truth of this contemplation? Really, it’s very sad, this truth. In the way I understand the practice, by facing this idea daily, I am to become less grasping after stasis and more accepting of the true nature of life, that it is transitory, from the briefest mental image or thought, from the strongest emotion to the longest life. Once I accept this, I suppose, I am free from a layer of sadness and anxiety about the inevitable changes, and this extra space allows me to appreciate what is before me more fully than I do when I am worried about something or someone slipping away. Earring. Dog. Daughters. Life. 

I may be a little tender on this reflection, considering the dog, considering that we’ve just dropped the younger daughter at college for the first time. The elder daughter will soon decamp from our comfortable pandemic bubble for a job in Boston. My sister the psychoanalyst is one year older today, which means I am, too. And none of your “she’s only one day older than she was yesterday” folderol. Sometimes the milestones hit you. 

Here’s a secret. I’ve found that when I contemplate these five remembrances, I feel a bit of relief. It’s just the teensiest bit of relief, more of a minute relaxation deep in my gut. I think it has to do with letting go of some of the struggle to collect and keep everyone and everything dear near. I think it has to do with releasing some shame around aging, illness, death, responsibility, and loss. I think there is shame around these things sometimes. We feel that if we experience them, it is our fault for not managing well enough in the world. We didn’t exercise enough, or eat the right food in the right amounts. We didn’t appreciate the gravity of our choices at the time and could have chosen better. Maybe you don’t feel that way, Readers. If so, I am glad for you. For me, I have found it so. Which means, that counterintuitive as it seems for me, these recollections do help me be more comfortable. 

I was informed that my earring, a thing I hold dear, was most likely retrievable from the trap under the bathroom sink. I marshaled my resources to figure that out—by which I mean I texted the husband, who said he would do it when he got home from work.

The husband did indeed find my earring. So what does that mean? It means that sometimes things from which we are separated come back to us. As Sting told us, back in the early 1980s, “If you love something, set it free, free, free.”

Sting’s lyric doesn’t exactly apply to losing an earring. It might apply, however, to letting your child leave for college, and your other no-longer-a-child child leave for a new phase of life as a college graduate working for peanuts and trying to make the world a bit better. By "letting your child" I don't suggest I have any choice in these things. The letting is internal.

However, because of the covid, the new college student will indeed be coming back to us. Her college is only allowing the first years one semester on campus. The rest of the academic year will be remote learning, so that the older students can have a semester there. Oy. Such is the ever-changing nature of things. 

Meanwhile, Readers, I started full time graduate school for social work this week. At the ripe old age of one thousand and ten, I am returning to school for a master’s degree, with a plan to become a therapist. I don’t know if this is wisdom or foolishness, embracing of life, or denial of time passing. Nevertheless, I go forward. I cannot escape illness, death, or aging. I cannot avoid responsibility for my choices or letting go of all I love. Okay. So be it. 

Kindness as a Key to Success

The other day, I invited a guest speaker into my classroom. I wanted to teach my students about meditation and mindfulness. Now, I have practiced meditation, mindfulness meditation, off and on for nearly twenty years. I have read books, listened to countless talks, and even attended a couple of short, half-day meditation retreats on the topic, yet I wanted someone else to teach my students. So in came our guest, who was great, and she talked about how she came to her practice, and types of practicing, and she led a short meditation. I really enjoyed listening to her, and I really admired how she owned it. That’s why I wanted someone else to teach my students. It’s the owning it thing. I don’t. At least not easily. It's not easy to write about it here, as a matter of fact.

When I took an online survey that ranked my top twenty character traits that reflect my values, spirituality was number twenty, bottom of the list. I was not surprised, and yet I was. I know the quiz ranked the qualities we most value as well as those we most often lead with and use to interpret the world. I lead with humor, honesty, love of learning, judgment, and kindness, not with spirituality. And yet, I have two decades of practice at something many people connect to spirituality.

Maybe I am a really bad meditator. Or maybe I am just a closet spiritualist.

Spiritualist is the wrong word. I am definitely not a spiritualist.

But I was a little disappointed to find spirituality down at the bottom of that list. Almost as disappointed to find that there as I was surprised to find kindness in the top five. Judgment, sure. I reckon I’m pretty dang judgmental. Humor? Absolutely. As Jane Austen said in P & P, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?" Honesty. Check. Love of learning--may I present this blog, a record of my foray into positive psychology and lord knows what else? Kind, though? Hmmm.

And yet. And yet. Perhaps there is a connection to the meditation practice and kindness. They say meditating helps you, but often you don’t know that it’s helping you. You just notice life is a little easier to handle. They also say that if you meditate, you develop compassion, aka kindness. Why is that so? Because once you take time to be mindful of what is going on inside you in the present moment, you realize that others are going through the same set of vicissitudes, also known as emotions, that you are. They’re not going through them at the same time you are, but they are going through the same ones. Thus, as you learn to be a little patient with yourself, you also learn a little patience with others, and a little compassion for everyone’s struggles, including your own. So maybe, just maybe, my stealth spirituality is reflected in my top five after all, via kindness.

And, if I am going to be kind to others, perhaps I can be kind to myself by reminding myself that judgment is not necessarily a pejorative characteristic. It’s an ability to see sides and facets and form an opinion based on discernment, rather than on pure reactivity.

I had my students take a quiz called the VIA Character Inventory. You can take it, too, for free.*  Quite a few of them had kindness in their top five. I found this surprising. Sure, they’re a nice bunch. Most of them are too quiet. Rendered speechless by the request to offer an opinion to the group, as a matter of fact and of deep annoyance to me. I feel quite judgmental about that reticence, and not in a kind way, if I’m honest, which according to the VIA character survey I usually am.

The relative preponderance of kindness in my classroom made me think that these kids might be reflecting a need they feel in our culture. Our popular culture, our news, our political leaders of late seem so far from kind that maybe our students, our kids, are presenting a collective need for it. I know that I have developed a real thirst for books about etiquette, and television shows that feature people behaving kindly and politely. The seventeen year old and I have been re-watching “Call the Midwife,” and one thing that show portrays is people in the poorest of circumstances behaving with politeness and dignity, even in the most undignified situations. I may start wearing a girdle soon I am so taken with the whole dignity of self-restraint thing. Give me a young, single gal dressed in a skirt, cardigan, and sensible shoes collapsing at a bus stop from an attempt at self-aborting a fetus over road rage and blatant insults on the nightly news any day.

Okay, not really. I don’t at all want to turn back the clock to illegal abortion and lack of contraception. I don’t want to turn back the clock at all. I want to move forward and beyond our current situation. But I recognize, and apparently so do many of my students, the need for kindness as we try to get there. I feel kind of hopeful about things, if kindness is a deep value for many of us. Kindness is not the sole property of the religious and spiritual. It’s available to all of us.

My students, or at least the two or three who do volunteer to speak, brought up the idea that kindness and politeness were two different things. That politeness is fake, or it can be. But I think they are related. Politeness might be fake—it certainly is fake, sometimes—but the adherence to it, particularly when you might not feel it, is truly kind. And when someone truly doesn’t deserve kindness, and no names will be named here, it’s a kindness to yourself to maintain dignity. Politeness, etiquette, allows that.

My children's elementary school principal taught us all this little self-reflection about kindness. I think it originated in the teachings of Buddha, but I am not sure. It's not a verse, it's more of a rubric for self-reflection, self-restraint, judgment in a positive sense, and kindness:

Before you speak, ask yourself, Is it kind? Is it necessary? Is it helpful? 

I know that when I do this, I have to stifle some of my natural urges, which would answer those questions thus: Is it kind? Absolutely not, but it's clever. Is it necessary? Again, it is the opposite of necessary, it is superfluous, but possibly funny, at least to me. Is it helpful? Only if you want to add to the inanity around us all. Sometimes, Readers, that is what I want to do. Sometimes that is actually kind, helpful, and necessary. Sometimes we just need to take off the mental girdle. Sometimes a bit of unnecessary folderol is actually necessary. That's what keeps me going. That and, apparently, kindness.

Peace.

*Here’s the link to the quiz. It takes about 15 minutes. You have to give an email address and after you take the quiz, scroll to the bottom of your screen and you’ll see the list of characteristics. https://www.viacharacter.org/

Letting Go

Readers, I have been unhealthily glued to the news and social media. I have been clinging to the news and suffering mightily. As have many of you, I am sure. Probably all of you. I have awakened at a different hour each night, and every time I do, the new POTUS is on my mind. This is really unpleasant, as he is so unpleasant.  And the news is so unpleasant, and yet I search it for new disasters or hints of hope. And as Buddha said, clinging is the source of suffering. 

So I am pivoting, like Kellyanne Conway, i.e. changing the subject to something I want to talk about it. However, unlike Kellyanne Conway, I am not providing #AlternativeFacts for you. 

Our family went to the Women’s March in NYC this weekend. The Women’s March, although a misnomer because it wasn’t only women - not by a long-shot - nor was it only about reproductive rights - was truly amazing. It was a highlight of my life. The MIL joined us, as did a friend of hers. It was so much more crowded than expected that soon the police had to open up the route to allow more people to flow. Well, “flow” is the wrong word. There was almost no movement. It took hours to go a few blocks. We all had to climb over a barricade at one point. I was so impressed that the MIL wanted to go, seeing as she is a grandmother, and there weren't that many grandparents there. And I was impressed with myself and all the other people I know who conquered their fear of crowds and of being stuck without access to bathrooms and of potentially being in a melée.  Well, my bladder held up and there was no brawl. 

Instead, it was peaceful, it was communal, it was a mixed crowd of genders and colors and issues all being compassionate and polite - except perhaps for the person who was smoking what was probably the largest doobie I have ever laid eyes upon. Perhaps some of my bliss came from inhaling that….

but, no, I felt it before I smelled it. The thing was, it felt so good to be around other people who care about the same things I do. And to realize that the crowd was much bigger than had been expected. And then to check social media and see the reports of the marches all around the country and the world. 

And yes, I know, the biggest crowds were on the coasts, which makes some people think this didn’t count. But I don’t believe it. I think the coasts are awake now, and some of the cities around the country had smaller marches, but still had marches, and those liberals are awake now, too. 

Look, I’m not going to have my inspiration sucked away by nay-sayers. It’s true that demonstrations aren’t policy; but they are important. I’ll just speak for myself. I found it fortifying to know I’m not alone in my concerns and in my views. And this knowledge has made me willing to be politically active, something I have not been in the past. I trust others will take away that energy, too. 

There is no way but forward. Forward through the mess. But still forward. 

I read an interesting article about how California is always a harbinger of the future. It has transformed from Republican destruction - with great damage to its public education system, mind you - to a progressive agenda now. I’m not hopeful we will escape the damage part, but I am hopeful that we will move forward with environmental awareness, clean energy, civil rights, and all that good stuff. 

But most of the time, I am roiling with anxiety. I'm anywhere but present and centered, as I'm reading up on what just happened and perseverating on what might be barreling down upon us in future. This is the opposite of being centered and present. 

Bartenders and hair stylists are often amateur psychologists. Mine is no exception. My hair stylist, that is. I don’t have a regular bartender, at least not yet. Anyway, my stylist - let’s call her Dawn - I saw today. In the nick of time, since, as I mentioned above, I am suffering from clinging to the latest news and updates regarding the current political situation on my social media feeds. Well, of course, we did broach the topic, because how could we not? Yet Dawn was smiling and calm. How was this possible? She said she limits herself to fifteen minutes of NPR on the way to work and fifteen minutes on the way home, and that is it. She did, she said, watch the Sunday morning news show this weekend with a friend and got a gander at the Portrait of Dorian Gray that is Kellyanne Conway, spokesperson for POTUS. And was shocked. 

Since she hasn’t been watching or listening to much news, she was actually pretty darn cheerful. Imagine that! We chatted about her recent eye surgery, the results of which are thrilling to her. 

“So tell me what it’s like to have eye surgery,” I said. And she did. When she mentioned with nonchalance that the laser malfunctioned the first time, I was traumatized by proxy. Then, when I asked her how they keep you from blinking, she said, “They use what they use in gynecological exams - a kind of speculum” - and proceeded to describe how it works. Scenes of horror flashed for me. 

“Were you anxious?” I asked, anxiously. “Were you sedated?”

“I don’t get anxious,” she said. “And they did use Twilight on me.” Twilight I think is that delightful stuff that killed Michael Jackson. It really is good. I’ve had it for procedures and you feel so rested afterwards. Unless, of course, you fail to awaken. 

But I digress. The important bit is the bit about Dawn not getting anxious. 

“How can you not get anxious?” I asked. 

“I have bad knees.” This sounded like a nonsequitur, but Dawn is a storyteller, so I waited. “This therapist I see told me that all the trauma I've suffered in my life" - and she has indeed, I know. I waited for her to say this trauma has caused her to dissociate in times of stress, because otherwise, why was she so calm? 

- "all the trauma has left my soul intact, but it all manifests in my body.” 

“Your knees?” I said.

“My knees.”

She continued working in silence for a while and then I told her about my recent experience meditating. This was yesterday. I figured I had better try to center myself (scaffolding of success, key to functioning in life) by meditating while the ninth grader studied and the husband commuted home. And how during the thirty minutes I set aside to relax and detach from the world and cultivate peace, the doorbell rang - the doorbell, I tell you - and then my phone, which had been pretty quiet all day, started receiving text and after text. I heard them all come in, but the phone was downstairs and I was up, so I couldn’t turn it off. So much for peace. 

"Well," Dawn said, “I have the book for you.” She glanced at me in the mirror. Maybe it isn’t the right moment for you, she said, butI read it at the right moment for me. The book is called The End of Your World, by Adyashanti.* “I’ll give you a synopsis. It’s very short.”

“Okay,” I said. 

“Okay, here it is. He says, ‘That thing you think is true? It is not true.’” Which is another way of saying it’s all in your head. So don’t worry about it. 

This sounds facile, I realize, Readers, but it reminded me of a truism I picked up in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is similar: Just because you think a thing is true doesn’t mean it is. Your fear is just fear. It doesn't mean the thing you fear is true. It might come true - true - but then again, it might not. 

So, I leave you with that. 

*An American West Coast guru, according to the interwebs.

Scaffolding of Success: Centering. And Death.

Oh Readers, my GR interview is almost ready, but not quite. I am waiting for the best place to put it for maximum exposure. In the meantime, let me enrich you with a little example of my success scaffolding in action. 

One of the planks of my scaffolding of success is mindfulness. I’m actually going to change that to centering. Centering is one of the planks in the scaffolding of success. Not everyone likes meditation, but everyone likes some kind of centering activity that tamps you down when you want to fly out of your skin and brings you back to a more peaceful place. Yoga, exercise, singing, a walk outside, and prayer are other examples of centering. Well, centering came into play this week. 

You see, I fell down the black hole of pondering death. Why? Well, why not? Or - because I had to have this tiny skin cancer removed and it triggered - trigger-warning - fear of death. Although, come to think of it, there’ve been other triggers around here of late. Last week something bad happened to a neighbor, something involving an ambulance. One of the children? One of the parents? I don’t know, because I don’t know the neighbors. They are pretty new in the neighborhood. I left them a note, but I haven't heard a thing. The situation makes me a little sick.  

Okay, so I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve earned it. People I loved and depended on have died, more than one of them. But especially my mother. I’ll admit it freely, her death did a number on me. I’m what they call "anxiously attached” to the people I love. This is basic attachment theory. Just ask my sister the psychoanalyst. Or trust me. I read three volumes by John Bowlby on attachment theory when I was working at Widener Library. It wasn’t part of the job. The job was data entry; but the perks were grand. All kinds of books filtered past my desk. Some of them stuck around for awhile. For example, the works of Bowlby (1907-1990), known for his Attachment Theory. So you can trust me when I say I’m anxiously attached. 

And one of the things I’m anxiously attached to is, well, life. So when I get a little something that needs to come off, suddenly, I am under a cloud of imminent death. I try to remember the wise words of high school acquaintance Victor Tolken (Class of 1981? 1982?) who said, “When I’m dead, I won’t care.” This gave me the most blessed moment of release from my anxiety (which was plaguing me even back then, in high school). Yes, right, I thought. I’ll be gone and I won’t care. So it’s the dying I fear, not the actual death. This sustained me for a good while. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have tried some of the things I tried in college. Ahem. 

Of course this calculus changes when I consider my progeny. I may have f-d them up. I will cop to a certainty that I have indeed f-d them up in some way or another, just by being a fallible human. But if I die before they grow up, I will have f-d them up in an irremediable manner. I cannot do that. So now, unfortunately, it is both the dying and the being dead I fear. Victor, where are you? 

My point is, despite joking to the husband that I had to go to the plastic surgeon on Monday to get my throat slit, and then making disparaging remarks about being trussed up by the legs and turned upside down over a bucket - so I would be kosher, at least, I was kind of wound up through the weekend and into the plastic surgeon’s office. 

Let me take a few words to recognize that I am one lucky person, having only to worry about a little skin thing, and that I am fully aware that right now there are people facing much worse problems and much more immediate threat of death. I know this. And now you know I know this. Nevertheless, this is what I was dealing with.

The thing about the anxiety was this. There it was, inside of me, consuming me. A big ball of it, expanding and crushing me. I wanted to take it out. I wanted to give it to someone else. I wanted to hand my big ball of anxiety to someone else - okay, to the husband (poor husband) - and for the someone else to say everything was going to be alright. But the thing was, everyone had already said it was going to be alright. There has not been a single doctor who has said anything other than that this little skin thing needs to come out and then it will be all gone. So there was some other thing going on. 

The other thing was that just as death comes for the archbishop, death comes for us all. Maybe not now, in this little skin cancer, but definitely at some time. That’s the real problem. The problem of death. It’s the kind of thing Buddhist monks meditate on, sitting in graveyards and outside of charnel houses; but I am not a Buddhist monk. I’m not even a Buddhist. I’m kind of an atheist JewBu. This means I get all of the neuroses and none of the reassurance, in other words. There is, sadly, no one to hand over this particular anxiety to. Because no one can solve it.

Fortunately, the last time I saw her, my friend Jo made me a beautiful necklace that is also a set of mala beads.  

She is amazing, isn’t she? 

She also made these earrings: 

Anyway, I’m not really a talisman sort of person, but I wore the necklace to the plastic surgeon’s office, and I held it in my hand while he numbed my neck and prepared to kosher me. The beads helped me remember that I am a person who meditates. This means that I am a person who sets aside a particular amount of time several days a week to sit on a cushion and try to pay attention to my breath. To try and to fail and to try again. That is what I mean by meditation. 

So I did that while the doctor removed the little skin cancer and stitched me up. I noticed my heart felt crushed and pained with anxiety and beat rapidly in response. This added another layer of anxiety about my heart exploding. I reminded myself that anxiety is just an emotion, and just because I feel it, doesn’t mean there is anything more to the feeling than that it is there. I reminded myself that behind the cloud of anxiety was clear sky. The anxiety would pass. It didn’t pass then, Readers, but at least I was able to see around the edges of it. Pema Chodron would be proud of me. Then the doctor applied a bandage and brought me a hand mirror. The gigantic slit I’d been picturing was a small thing, hidden behind a steristrip. Then I got dressed and left. I still have to wait another week for the stitches to come out and the pathology report, but I feel much better. 

This is the scaffolding of success supporting me. 

Failure Equals Success

The other night, the husband and I watched an episode of “Silicon Valley,” which I highly recommend. It’s hilarious. Which is not my point, although it is A point. In this episode, the very weird genius chief executive of a hugely successful Google/Apple type company launches a product that just totally fails. It’s a bomb. Nothing works. So this genius chief exec has to appease his board of directors. He does so by claiming that because most successful inventions start out as unsuccessful failed prototypes, this spectacular failure is not really a bad thing. It’s actually a jumping off point for a future success. In fact, he says, it’s not even a failure at all. And if it’s not a failure, and if it is the precursor to success, well then, it is as good as success. Ergo FAILURE = SUCCESS. 

The husband turned to me and said, "You really have to blog about this." 

To myself I thought, But this is just a big blowhard twisting things around to try to wriggle out of a bad situation by creating some clumsy double-speak. On the other hand, is there some truth to what he says? 

The truth is that that there is more than one truth. 

First of all, how you look at a fact and how you interpret it is indeed colored by your attitude. You can get discouraged if something doesn’t work the first time, and make a little hatch mark on your scoreboard under “I Told You So - Things Never Turn Out for Me.” Or you can say to yourself, I expected things would take time. If at first you don’t succeed, etc, etc. This works if you feel that eventually, you will accomplish your goal. And you will have that confidence if by some miracle you survived your childhood and grew up feeling valued and supported, encouraged and not condemned for mistakes. 

I don’t know that many people like that. But there is always therapy. And affirmations, meditation, positive thinking, friends who believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself - and medication. 

Point: that this attitude can be difficult to develop, but not impossible. But I digress, Readers. 

Second of all, it is true that there are always missteps en route to a goal. Once again, how you react to these missteps determines so much. This reminds me of a recent email from the principal of our middle school about a book he’s reading called The Talent Code. This book talks about “deep practice”. Deep practice means learning from your mistakes and practicing to overcome them. Rather than practice something in a half-assed manner over and over, ignoring your mistakes, and thereby thoroughly ingraining those mistakes in your brain, you do it full-assed, stopping and taking those mistakes apart. That way you never learn it wrong.

I read about something related to deep practice in Bounce, by Daniel Seyd, which debunked the idea that talent is everything. Smart coaching and smart learning are key, according to Seyd. He points out that top athletes are exceptional because they have great coaches who help them break down every aspect of their game to tweak it; then, they practice these tweaks until they become automatic. The more parts of your game you make habitual or automatic, the more brain you have left to adjust to the unexpected - and win.  Smart studying, smart coaching, smart analysis: you look at what isn’t working and you figure out how to fix it, rather than practicing the same mistakes over and over again. 

Third of all, think about professional musicians, writers, athletes. They constantly practice their crafts. Every time a musician tackles a new piece, she has to learn it. She will stumble and make mistakes. Eventually she will prevail. Same with a writer. Crapola first draft, second draft, twelfth draft. Eventually, he creates a final draft. Viewed one way, these people are failing over and over again, right up until they succeed. But we don’t look at it like that. We call it practice or revision. Again, from Bounce: consider the figure skater. If you watch a figure skater practice, you will see a person literally falling on her ass over and over and over. That is because once she masters one move, she’s on to the next, harder one. So her success is truly built on multiple failures. 

I recently listened to a talk by Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal entitled, “Benefits of Failure.” Viewed in one way, meditation is practicing failure over and over. That is, the instructions to meditate are very simple: sit still, and notice your breath. Well, if you’ve ever tried to do that, you discover how very easily your mind wanders off and forgets to notice your breath. Failure. So you simply learn to notice when your mind wanders, and return your attention to your breath. When your mind again wanders off, you refocus it on your breath. Failure after failure. 

But, says Gil Fronsdal, maybe we should not look at this as failure. Maybe we should just look at it as practice. Meditation is less about the breath than about practicing paying attention to the breath. The benefit of failure in this case is that we learn that meditation is always about this same effort of returning attention to the breath and failing to maintain it. Failing to maintain that attention is inevitable, so we might as well relax and accept that we will be at this for a long time. 

As Churchill said, “Success always demands a greater effort.”

As Churchill did NOT say, “Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” 

(https://richardlangworth.com/success)

Happy Thanksgiving! May your oven work and your guests be hungry. 

Follow-Through

I have a bit of trouble with follow-through, especially when it involves logistics. For example, just last week, I mailed our New Year's cards. Last week also contained the husband's birthday as well as my late mother's and my nephew's, which are the same day. 

I managed to select and send a gift for my nephew, and have it arrive on time. He's six, FYI, and per his mother's suggestion, I purchased something noisy: the DVD of "Big Hero 6." The husband, I'm afraid, fared less well. In short, I ignored the approach of his day until it was upon me. That’s the sad truth. And Google gave away my late gift–getting. When he logged onto the computer to update the crossword blog, banner ads for bacon of the month and warm hats with earflaps proliferated. Surprise! (Not so much.)

I’m a bad wife.
Heck, I’m a bad person.
At the very least, I’m a bad gift-giver.
See, I forget about birthdays.

But that’s not my only failing, gift-wise. There’s a gift for my father (Hi, Dad!) on the windowsill of the study. It’s been there since well before Xmas. It’s been there since before my last trip to Washington, in fact, where I bought him another gift, intending to send the windowsill gift later – but in time for Xmas.

And there’s the baby gift for my friend’s granddaughter. It’s all wrapped up with a curly ribbon. Make that a limp, crumpled curly ribbon, since the package has been moving from the dining room table to the kitchen counter to the dining room table to the kitchen counter for umpteen months. Why, you ask? Maybe it’s me balking at having a friend with a granddaughter. That would be a handy excuse. But really, the reason is much more banal. See, I lost the daughter’s address AND forgot the daughter’s husband’s name and I’m too embarrassed to ask my friend for these pieces of information a second time. So this gift is waiting, wrapped. Probably until another friend has another grandchild, because this one has developed past the appropriate age for this gift that I got her six months ago.

However, that is not what I set out to write about. I set out to write about meditation. Specifically, how I can persist in not doing it while simultaneously longing to. As if choosing to sit myself down and breathe is beyond my ability. As if it were as difficult as, say, my daughters’ math homework.

But I digress. Meditation is something I want to do. It is also something against which, now that it has become so popular that the term “mindfulness” is bandied about by everyone except my father and my mother-in-law, I have some kind of knee-jerk reaction. Even though I’ve been meditating – off and on – for a very long time. I can't bring myself to do it now. I can't get back to the cushion. Even the thought of Goldie Hawn blissing out since circa 1972, and Jerry Seinfeld with his TM since circa 1972, and Oprah and Arianna and on and on. I can't.

Gotta love Goldie. And she's helping kids with mindfulness. 

I tried meditation for the first time my senior year of college, for krike’s sake. In my dorm room one afternoon, I sat criss-cross-apple-sauce on one of those large, ubiquitous student dorm cushions. Before I knew it, Readers, I was hovering just below the ceiling, looking down upon myself. Like in that scene in Mary Poppins where they laugh their way up to the ceiling. It was the strangest feeling, detached and peaceful. After a few minutes, I thought, “Uh, maybe I’m not ready for this.” And down I came, gently.  I put aside meditation for a decade or so, until I had a child and was well into yoga.

Well, I didn't mean to catalogue my history with meditation. My point, and I think I may have one, was to show that I have a history with meditation, and that therefore, my current resistance to it is strange. Now that more and more studies come out showing that meditation does work, to some degree, to make people happier, more centered, more positive, more equanamous. Or at least less stressed. I know it works. It has worked for me before. You’d think I’d be all over it. But something about the ubiquity turns me off. It’s little of that fear of people thinking I’ve jumped on the bandwagon now that it’s hit the main strip. And so what? Why does that bother me? You know, as I think about it, I practically hear my mother(step) ridiculing me for wanting to dress like other kids back in high school. Shades of, “If everyone jumped off the Empire State building, would you do it, too?” Is that it? My mother's (step) voice is holding me back? Pul-ease.

Ridiculous, I know. Hard to shake, too.

On a more practical level, I guess there’s another reason. It has to do with the limits of meditation. It’s not in fact a cure-all. As I discovered last year, when I was so terribly, terribly anxious. Meditation hadn’t staved that off. I needed a pill. So then what was the point? I was mad at myself for not being able to overcome my own anxiety with the power of my will to meditate.

And the pills made me feel better. So then I didn’t need to meditate.

But there is a little voice inside me reminding me that now is the time to build up the habit. Now, when I feel good, when I don’t need it, is the time to practice. So that next time, if there is a next time, that the "mean reds" overcome me, I will have enough mileage behind the meditation practice that it just might be all I need. I need to speak to that internal admonitory voice. I need to tell it this. “Just because everyone is into it, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.” I’m talking about meditation. I don’t need to prove I did it before it went mainstream. I just need to do it again.