You know what meditation is? It’s the practice of turning your brain on and off again.
I mean look, the world is hard. Life is hard. There’re 10 million things coming at you at once, on top of the million things your mind is thinking about any given time.
I mean even trying to turn off you brain is hard. Try going to the quietest place you can think of. Sit there for 55 seconds, listening. It gonna be loud. It’s always loud. I live in NYC, this place is never quiet.
You’ll never find perfect quiet. How do you think that makes your brain feel?
We love the feed though. We crave stimulus like the bored lab rat craves the electric wire. It’s ever present in modern society, merely a thumbprint away from the endless expanse of the internet. [and a bunch of weirdly specific tailored ads.]
So all you have is this pulsing desire to keep feeding an unending, unsatisfying, mundane existence. Hours of midnight poured into nothing important, just because you can’t turn away.
Meditation is the opposite. It is literally the practice of putting it down. Not drowning your sorrows but existing in them with peace and sincerity.
Instead, I’m forever overwhelmed. The screens in my life scroll without purpose, a constant draw to apathy and voyeurism that makes me feel nothing but more more more.
I want it to stop. I don’t want to have these things come at me. I want to turn it off and turn away.
But that takes work. It takes some of the most difficult and disciplined effort to actively do nothing. It’s hard on schedule too, because when do I ever deserve time off? Kill time. When can I ever clear the plate enough so that I can purposefully be fog? Nothing but sit, and breath and listen to the universe around me.
The mind doesn’t like being quieted either. Some voice in the back of your head keeps running the list of chores, or over thinking that last text, or trying to see what’s good for lunch.
That’s person is chided, is calmed, is ignored. I want to be present. I want to not worry. I want to un-think existence, except to realize the nobody and nothing and infinity that I am.
It’s that idyllic quietness that I think is my best self. Because that is an internal happiness; unmoored from the situation or environment. Untethered to our understanding of physics.
Instead of being the subject of the feed or of your surrounding, I am trying to reach peace and happiness of myself first, and then apply that to the situations before me.
When I work from a place of happiness and satisfaction, yeah I’m busy. I’m frantic. TV? Video games? There could be no greater sin for my ambition is too hungry.
But when my baseline is established, through hard, boring work, I am happy. I am loved. I am working on it.
Try meditating. It’s not easy, especially at first, but like all skills, can be honed and made better. I am constantly pleased with how this tool is applicable everywhere. That the simplicity of breathing and being is so positively encouraging to the person I want to be. The person that at any given moment, I can ascribe myself to be so.
It’s mastery of the mind, if nothing else. To tame the wandering supercomputer that is my sub and present consciousness. Instead of being subject to my whims, I can channel or understand or challenge what my ordinary default answer would be. Giving me a range of options and control to make active choices.
By reigning in my emotions and checking my mind, I can approach the world around me with my best self: calm, thoughtful, and engaged. I can find peace in the noisy, hectic and, overwhelming situations. The calm makes me better able to make good decisions.
I lose nothing I don’t need when I meditate. In fact, I would argue, I don’t even lose any negative qualities. I don’t change myself. It’s a practice in accepting yourself completely. A practice of better understanding myself to simply equip myself with custom tools to do what is best for me.
Sometimes it’s hard. There are those depressive swings that you cannot shake, waves that don’t relent long enough to give you time to flail, and only the energy to survive. Only one more breath. One more second. Just enough energy to stop lying face down on the floor for the last 2 hours and move to lying face up on the couch for the next 4.
Those are the breaths that are most important. Just enough to sustain until the next one. But, if you can quiet the self-hate, the self-degradation; the part of you that flickers between raging at your stupid, useless, unworthy self, and the gravity of painful and all-but-justifiable [all but.] lowliness. That showed me exactly how to find peace. To accept with each breath in, and to be born anew with each breath out. Every millimeter fought, gained, lost, proud of it all, until the mountain becomes a summit. I can look around, set my feet, spread my fingers, and point at the next peak.
I don’t know if I’ll get there. And I know there are valleys inbetween us. But I’m going, and if it’s ever too much, I’ll remember to take a breath or two or 50, until I’m ready to go again.