Sunday, October 26, 2008

Still breathing

I have to say that it fascinates me to see that there are still regular visitors to this more or less moribund blog. Just so you know, I'm alive and well and living here now.

I doubt that I'll post on this old blogger site very often -- there just won't be time to keep it up. Eventually I think I will just take the whole thing down, but not until I've had time to archive all the posts as I think there was some good writing here from time to time.

But here's one bloggerly navel-gazing reflection while I'm here and thinking about the years that this site took me through. A week or so ago, I was walking a little blearily in the city with an old friend of mine. We were on our way to buy a bottle of something good, and we happened to pass the building that used to house a meditation group that I attended fairly faithfully for a couple of years. I mentioned this to my friend and was surprised by his surprise. Somehow at the time I had thought it was fairly common knowledge that I had fallen in with a group of rowdy nogoodnik Theravadan Buddhists who took me over to the dark side. We talked a bit about what I thought I had learned there, and he surprised me a second time by telling me that both he and his wife had noticed that I had changed a great deal in the past 3 years ish. He said they had put this down to my having lots of new entertainment and success at work, the book, and so on but now asked me to reflect on whether I thought the mindfulness training had had anything to do with my transformation. I had never really thought about this before, but now that I have, I really wonder -- was this chance encounter with an entirely different way of engaging with life really the beginning of what has happened to me and not, as I've always thought, the combination of having the luxury of a sabbatical year to reflect on who I was and what I wanted and some unexpected successes at the conclusion of that year?

I often tell people who are interested that for me I thought the great turning point in my life was the day when I dared to think about not going on with my career but instead making a dramatic break to do something else (some crazy thing like growing grapes or making beer). But perhaps it was the meditation that had really laid the proper groundwork for my being in a position to entertain that crazed notion. Perhaps without having worked hard to get the tiniest glimpse of a greater truth and my own insignificance, I wouldn't have been able to even see the possibility of an alternative future. And then, having reflected on making a complete break, I returned to my old place in the world with a fresh pair of eyes and the conviction that if I were to continue with a life of study and research it would have to be on my own terms, looking at problems that mattered to me, and not simply doing the things that I thought would help me maintain a little bit of funding and drift happily and in a state of partial anesthesia to a comfortable retirement.

From my present viewpoint, remarkably, this all seems to have worked out fairly well for me. But on the other hand, the way that I've gotten here helps me to remember that everything that I've built up over the last couple of years could fall down again in an instant. The big difference now is that I understand that if it did I'd still be ok. And the world around me wouldn't even sigh.

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