latent spirituality or, er, laziness
A few of the people who read this know that I sometimes think of myself as something of a Buddhist. Not that I'm a particularly religious person, but I am nagged from time to time by the feeling that there is some element of my life that is not quite captured by anything I could document in any set of simple sentences. I definitely don't think there's something 'up' there, but I think there's something 'in' there and there have been one or two moments in my life when I feel as though I might have been pretty close to it, if only for the briefest of instants.
All this long exegesis (which could be much longer, but maybe some other day) to get to the point -- one that astonishes me. I've been back in Ontario now for about 7.5 months, and today, I confess with some slight amount of wonder, was the first day that I've sat and meditated in this house. I mean, I've meditated in the every day sense of the word quite a lot. And I've engaged in a few of those very short, Tibetan style intensive mind-blanking exercises, but mostly I've just put my spiritual life on the back burner over the ridiculous crazy business that has engulfed me since moving here. And now that I think of it, I didn't sit very often in Nova Scotia either, but there my life was so slow and perfect that I was never that far from a meditative state and could easily put myself in touch with everything I felt I needed with a few minutes of sitting on a rock beside the ocean.
Today I sat for 15 minutes (very short, yes), listening to ragged breath, following my heart rate all over the place, being amazed by the sounds and stresses in my body (encouraging at least that I could pick them up that quickly). In that short period of time (when I should have been thinking of nothing) the thought that occurred to me was that I spend a great deal of my time ruing the fact that I'm spending so much of my time at home engaging in three word conversations with words no more than 4 letters long with a couple of insane 3 year olds when I'd rather be wrestling with the big problems of life and the universe. What's funny about that is that the gulf between those 'big' thoughts and what's really lying out there waiting for me -- all of us -- is at least as big as the gulf between my toddler talk and my big science act. Sobering. Therapeutic.
I think what set all of this in motion might have been a brief instant on Friday morning. I was making my usual upwind slog through the icy channels of the local park to my job. I was hung over from yet another ill-considered work night out with the boys (the band got better and better with every beer and I just had to hear their best) and I had a very important afternoon meeting with an architect whom I hoped to convince to become entangled with me in some kind of artistic virtual vision. As I tried to milk some toothsome artistic phrases out of my water starved beer brain, really feeling that I was making some progress, I was startled by a short shout of MEH! from my right. A chilly goat in the little park zoo was passing comment on my efforts. It turns out the goat had brought things into the right kind of frame for me. At the meeting, I talked about building virtual spaces that adapted to user movement. The architect talked about building real spaces using fancy materials and mechatronics that, essentially, ate people, but in a loving way. I thought this was a match made in heaven. He thought it was a bridge too far. On a good day, I might have been able to nudge him a bit, if not sway him completely. But it was not a good day. At least he did agree to listen to my ranting again in a couple of weeks.
As the lesson (whatever it was -- only listen to bad bar bands on work nights?) soaked in over Saturday, there was much sobering thought about that goat critique, my grand designs, and the grander-by-far sea of being that grounds all of it. By Sunday, this had led me, quite sensibly, to my hard little bench, my sore knees, and my rasping breath.
All this long exegesis (which could be much longer, but maybe some other day) to get to the point -- one that astonishes me. I've been back in Ontario now for about 7.5 months, and today, I confess with some slight amount of wonder, was the first day that I've sat and meditated in this house. I mean, I've meditated in the every day sense of the word quite a lot. And I've engaged in a few of those very short, Tibetan style intensive mind-blanking exercises, but mostly I've just put my spiritual life on the back burner over the ridiculous crazy business that has engulfed me since moving here. And now that I think of it, I didn't sit very often in Nova Scotia either, but there my life was so slow and perfect that I was never that far from a meditative state and could easily put myself in touch with everything I felt I needed with a few minutes of sitting on a rock beside the ocean.
Today I sat for 15 minutes (very short, yes), listening to ragged breath, following my heart rate all over the place, being amazed by the sounds and stresses in my body (encouraging at least that I could pick them up that quickly). In that short period of time (when I should have been thinking of nothing) the thought that occurred to me was that I spend a great deal of my time ruing the fact that I'm spending so much of my time at home engaging in three word conversations with words no more than 4 letters long with a couple of insane 3 year olds when I'd rather be wrestling with the big problems of life and the universe. What's funny about that is that the gulf between those 'big' thoughts and what's really lying out there waiting for me -- all of us -- is at least as big as the gulf between my toddler talk and my big science act. Sobering. Therapeutic.
I think what set all of this in motion might have been a brief instant on Friday morning. I was making my usual upwind slog through the icy channels of the local park to my job. I was hung over from yet another ill-considered work night out with the boys (the band got better and better with every beer and I just had to hear their best) and I had a very important afternoon meeting with an architect whom I hoped to convince to become entangled with me in some kind of artistic virtual vision. As I tried to milk some toothsome artistic phrases out of my water starved beer brain, really feeling that I was making some progress, I was startled by a short shout of MEH! from my right. A chilly goat in the little park zoo was passing comment on my efforts. It turns out the goat had brought things into the right kind of frame for me. At the meeting, I talked about building virtual spaces that adapted to user movement. The architect talked about building real spaces using fancy materials and mechatronics that, essentially, ate people, but in a loving way. I thought this was a match made in heaven. He thought it was a bridge too far. On a good day, I might have been able to nudge him a bit, if not sway him completely. But it was not a good day. At least he did agree to listen to my ranting again in a couple of weeks.
As the lesson (whatever it was -- only listen to bad bar bands on work nights?) soaked in over Saturday, there was much sobering thought about that goat critique, my grand designs, and the grander-by-far sea of being that grounds all of it. By Sunday, this had led me, quite sensibly, to my hard little bench, my sore knees, and my rasping breath.
posted by Colin at 9:35 PM
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