Lent Halftime Report

6 March^, 2019 – TGV Paris-Geneva

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I didn’t have time to go to church.  Not that I’ve ever gone to church on Ash Wednesday before, but I am trying to take Lent a little more seriously these days.  This year I’ve decided to give up sugar – as in so-called “added” sugar, so fruit is okay, but pain au chocolat is not.  Granted, 12 hours without sugar is not anything to congratulate oneself about, and today I was in our office on Rue de La Boetie, where the cheese cart in the canteen is a helpful distraction.  Nonetheless, the day was long and mentally tiring, and right now I would typically find myself lashing into a cookie or an EAT NATURAL bar or something. Richard Rohr writes some good stuff about the importance of aligning heart, mind and body when it comes to contemplation.      

16 March 2019 – GVAàFRA

Starting a 10-day trip to the US, which will bring me to Boston for a bunch of meetings, then to Las Vegas next week for three days.  A clear, bright morning in Geneva, almost empty going through security, and I found a smooth, easy rhythm, tapping the smiley-face button to indicate my satisfaction with things.  This feeling likely won’t last long, as the rest of the week will be busy and stressful and will not lend itself willingly to reflection and quiet.

On that note, I am trying to use this trip to get more into Lent study and reflection.  I am keeping with my sugar abstinence, which Lydia points out is kind of hypocritical since I eat roughly my own weight in dates every day, but still I think it does its job of making me more acutely aware of my own desire.  I imagine “temptation” is the proper word here; that is indeed the word used in my Lent study guide, which comes courtesy of something called Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.  Week 1 focuses on Luke 4, and the forty days in the wilderness and the temptation of Jesus.  I noticed for the first time this morning that the real drama in those passages comes at the end of the forty days, when Satan shows up to tempt JC.  To draw a weak parallel to my business travels, it’s relatively easy to stay disciplined about things when you’re breezing through GVA airport security on day one; the harder part is at the end of a trip like this, when all the fatigue has accumulated and your willpower has eroded and you flick mindlessly through your phone as you wait for your connecting flight home.

Isn’t this essential to what being a Christian is all about?  Truly living by choosing the good and deep and true, instead of succumbing to baser desires (and in so doing living a life that is more like death)?  I did slog through all of Augustine’s Confessions last year, so I should know something about this.  To quote Nasim Taleb (quoting Procrustes): “Love without sacrifice is theft.  This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.”

20 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Up early with jet lag and managed to get myself down to the gym at least to run a little.  One always feels better. 

A study question for this week is “Where and when did God manage to get your attention?”  This is preceded by a story about a thunderstorm and some lines about the “power and intensity of nature” as a sign of God’s presence.  Today, I read Genesis 15, when God tells Abraham that he will have as many descendants as stars in the sky, etc.  While reading it in my (highly recommended) Olive Tree bible study app, I found a note I had written, probably several years ago now, at Gn 15:12 (“…And behold, dreadful and great darkness came upon him.”).  My note said, “Is darkness necessary for light/God to appear?” 

This got me thinking about my own faith, which, to tell you the truth, has felt kind of forced and lukewarm lately.  Over the past months, I haven’t felt that strong emotive pull, while at church or anywhere else, that I felt, say, when I was reading the Bible deeply for the first time, or when I started to go to church regularly several years ago.  Maybe this is because things are relatively stable and comfortable for me at the moment (ed: abrupt scraping sound as the writer falls out of his chair to touch all the visible wood in the apartment).  Yeah, my job is stressful and there’s some uncertainty about the future, but I don’t feel any heavy darkness.  This was the exact word that I used to describe that feeling I would have, around the time my marriage was falling apart, when I would wake up in the morning and feel this heavy and intense sense of remorse, dread, fear: darkness.  Back in Genesis 15, God doesn’t come down and hit Abraham with the heavy pyrotechnics right off the bat.  He waits for a “dreadful and great darkness” to fall upon him, and only in the midst of that darkness does He make His covenant with Abraham.  So, perhaps God reveals Himself to us only (or most powerfully) when darkness falls.  One of our jobs, especially during Lent, is to at least be conscious of this, and perhaps learn keep an eye out for Him even when light is shining.  And (touching wood again) to be mindful that darkness is never that far away.

21 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

In a hurry this morning between the gym and meetings.  Just time to read Psalm 27, and a great line in verse 13: “I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Not bad for a one-line philosophy, and a good, slightly cheeky, answer to the question, “What do you believe in?”  It’s always tough to parse the words too closely when you’re dealing with a translation, but I find the fact that it specifies “in the land of the living” interesting: this is not about just waiting for a kingdom of heaven later on, it’s about appreciating and glorifying God here, in this life, in the land of the living.  And rhythmically, it forms a catchy heptameter up until “Lord” (if you combine “I” and the first syllable of “beLIEVE” into one beat).   Right on.

22 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Friday morning, up early with a couple of free hours before work, so I do some laundry and have breakfast and read and write a little.  Today was the story of the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28), and again (as in Genesis 15, see above), God arrives on the scene only after darkness falls and the three disciples are “heavy with sleep.”  Later we hear the voice of God, but not before a cloud comes and overshadows them.  The bit at the end, when Moses and Elijah step off stage, and God seems to single out Jesus above the other two, feels like it was tacked on later by someone who really wanted to make a point.  Of course this is a pretty important point for Christians: the other two were just prophets, while JC was God incarnate.  But then again nowhere in this passage does God say anything like “never mind about all that stuff Moses said;” only, “This is my son…listen to him!”

I also pause a bit at the very end, when Peter, John, and James come down from the mountain and don’t tell anyone what they’ve seen.  Why not?  There were three of them after all, so it’s not like later on (Luke 22) when a solitary Peter, trying to save his own skin, denies knowing Jesus.  And evidently at some point later they did tell someone about what happened on the mountain, or else we wouldn’t be reading about it in Luke’s gospel.  This could be a message about our own fearfulness, and our reluctance, even after seeing glowing visions and hearing the voice of the Big Man himself, to put ourselves out there and seem like we’re crazy or blasphemous. 

23 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

I went to Kendall Square Cinema last night and saw a German film called Transit.  The backdrop was the spread of Nazism – people were asked for their papers a lot, and characters made a few hushed references to “cleansings” – but it was shot in the present day, mostly in Marseilles, as German dissidents of various stripes tried to get the hell out of Europe.  The filmmakers didn’t try to modernize it per se: there were no cell phones, everything is done on paper, the passage out of Marseilles is all by boat, etc.  More like they might have thought about making it faithful to 1944, when Anna Segher wrote it, but then decided to spare themselves the expense and hassle of rounding up a bunch of old cars and fedoras.  Many people spoke German when you didn’t expect them to – like at the Mexican Consul in Marseilles.  Anyway, the movie was a bit better in theory (“Casablanca meets Kafka” said Anthony Lane in the New Yorker) than in practice. 

On the way home, I stopped by the Smokehouse, where I ate pulled pork and coleslaw and drank beer while watching both the NCAA basketball tournament and the NCAA wrestling championships simultaneously on two flat screens next to each other on the wall opposite.  With TVs on practically every open wall space, American restaurants are always handy for people who are eating alone, or who would rather look at something other than the people with whom they are eating.

This morning we read Isaiah 55 and Psalm 63.  Some nice imagery in both around feeling a physical desire for God: “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you” (Ps 63:1).  Again the theme of resisting earthly desires for the transcendent, and in this case, cleverly picking up the weapons of the enemy, so to speak. 

25 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Back from a not-too-exhausting orangetheory workout on a Monday morning.  Coffee, grapefruit, toast with peanut butter.  Although I just noticed that the bread has freaking sugar in it, even though it’s “whole wheat” from Whole Foods.  The tricks that marketers play.  I am allowing myself to have some anyway, as I feel like I need some carbohydrates after the gym, and therefore this is not about satisfying a craving for sweets.  This may be a flimsy rationale, but maybe it raises an interesting question: does intent matter when it comes to sin?  Maybe an extreme example would be someone who kills in a war, or in self-defense, as having different “intent” than someone who murders for money, or hatred, or a more “selfish” motive?  Or someone who steals to feed his family?  It’s tough to think of too many examples here.  JC doesn’t split hairs in today’s reading (Luke 13:6-9) and offers only two choices: repent or perish. 

A short but enjoyable weekend with my daughters.  We ate cordon bleu and Brussels sprouts with bacon and rice pilaf, and we played hearts and Not Alone.  On Sunday, breakfast at Friendly Toast and Ellie’s soccer tournament, and a trip to the movie theater, and Chinese food.  Boys send Sarah messages over Snapchat.   

26 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Today’s we covered the “Jesus Prayer,” which is not too hard to remember because it’s only one line: “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me as a sinner.”  There was also link to something called orthodoxprayer.org, which has a detailed analysis of the Jesus Prayer.  It talks about how it helps “focus our mind exclusively on God with no other thought occupying our mind but the thought of God.”  This gets my head nodding, as I’ve been thinking lately about how in a certain way Christianity and Buddhism are two sides of the same coin (or maybe even the same side).  This website itself talks about prayer as a discipline, “to help our soul gain control over our overactive brains and create stillness…”; Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation and Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True  both cover the same territory.  I know Merton (a Trappist monk) has written extensively about Buddhism itself, which I need to get around to reading one of these days.

And yet, the last section on the orthodoxprayer.org page, there’s a whole section called: “Jesus Prayer Is Not a Form of Eastern Meditation.”  I don’t have time to explore this all in detail right now, but some of it I disagree with (especially the insistence of Buddhism espousing an “impersonal God”) and some of it I don’t (stuff about nothingness).     

What I think about when I think about thinking about not thinking

Last month, after finishing Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, I decided to do a little experiment.  In the book, Wright looks at Buddhism through the lens of evolutionary psychology.  The Buddha taught that desire is the cause of our suffering; modern evolutionary biologists, according to Wright, have validated the Buddha’s hypothesis.  The evolutionary argument goes that the human brain was designed by natural selection to be guided by those perceptions, thoughts and feelings that will ensure that our genes get passed onto another generation.  So we’re programmed to chase pleasure through things like eating, having sex, besting rivals, etc.  However, this pleasure is fleeting and marginally declining, so our brains need to play tricks on us – to delude us – to keep us desiring those things.   We end up stuck on what a psychologist would call “the hedonic treadmill,” and what a Buddhist would call samsara.  This is all kind of abstract, but one need look no further for concrete evidence than the opiate epidemic in my home country, or a subway car full of people all staring at their smart phones.  The practice of meditation, Wright argues, is a means of appreciating what’s going on here, of seeing the world as it really is, and, ideally, of finding a way out of this vicious cycle.  I’m not doing justice either to Robert Wright or to the Buddha here, and there are a bunch of other complicated ideas like emptiness and not-self that I’m not going to get into, but hopefully you get the main idea. 

I happened to finish the book on June 30^th, so I decided that, starting on July 1^st, I would try to do mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes per day, every day, for a month.  Practically, I followed a basic technique that Wright describes: I set the timer on my phone for 20 minutes (“Slow Rise” is a good alarm tone for this purpose, by the way), and I would try to focus my thoughts on my breathing.  When I found my thoughts drifting to something else, I would try to observe where my thoughts were going (and perhaps ask myself why they might have gone in that direction), and then gently guide them back in the direction of my breathing.  And repeat.  I also tried to write down some notes after every session to capture whatever insights I might run into while they were still fresh.

Beforehand, I had dabbled a bit with meditation but never really tried to do it seriously or for any length of time.  By the end of July, I didn’t encounter any great truths during the month, and my life didn’t change dramatically (both Wright and the Buddha would argue that expecting those things to happen after a month would be missing the point).  But, slowly, and without my fully realizing it at the time, a few things started to become clear, or at least clearer.

1.       If you make even a small effort to think about what you’re thinking about (or rather, what you find yourself thinking about when you’re trying not to think about anything), you may learn a thing or two about yourself.

Whenever I had tried meditating before, it was always when I was alone, usually on an airplane or in a hotel room.  So my first observation was that for some reason I was hesitant to meditate at home, and with other people around.   Why was this?  Fear of feeling vulnerable, of being perceived as one of those “people who meditates?”  I felt this even more clearly when hearing footsteps down the hall during my session: tension in my neck/throat and upper chest at the thought of someone seeing me.  Once I recognized this feeling, it went away (Wright describes this as well).

“Shallow Grave” by Elvis Costello was playing in my head as I was thinking about my breathing becoming shallower.  20 minutes felt like they went by fast.  I felt more relaxed, gentler, more open toward people and things directly afterward.  (July 1^st, Geneva)

The thoughts that take you away from your breathing almost always have to do with the future or the past.  Most of mine tend to focus on obligations: things I need to do, like my taxes, or work things, or money things.  I may have had a fleeting moment of “observing myself” today: I thought of the fact that I am, like many Americans who live overseas, a bit delinquent in the filing of my US tax returns.  This thought triggered a kind of twitch, at four points in my lower and upper back. 

One notices the birds a lot when meditating in our guest bedroom.  (July 2^nd, Geneva)

I had seen a story on my phone about a fight that had broken out during a basketball game between Australia and the Philippines, and I thought about how I would mention it to Gerard, the guy who cleans our apartment who happens to be Filipino, when I saw him next on Saturday.  It got me thinking about people’s motivations: mine, in this case, and in many others, was about being liked and accepted, in this case by the Filipino guy who cleans our apartment. 

Near the end of my 20 minutes today, the guys and the truck showed up outside to pick up the garbage, and the usual sounds ensued: motors, banging of metal, guys yelling.  It’s easy to imagine this being perceived as an annoying or unpleasant , but I didn’t experience it like that.  They were there, at that time, doing their work, which is pretty important work in terms of the overall functioning of things.  An easy example of Wright’s point about things being how / what we perceive them, or rather having whatever significance we choose to give them, not significance (essence) in themselves.  (July 3^rd, Geneva)

2.       Meditating can be the gateway to more empathy, which is categorically a good thing.  (Or: Your thoughts are not all bad.)

Wright develops the argument that our thoughts “think themselves:” that our brains, programmed to motivate us to get our genes to the next generation, can very often give us a distorted view of reality.  One of the “goals” of meditation is to see these illusions for what they are.  Taken too literally and too far, though, one can conclude from this idea that every thought that comes into your head is somehow illegitimate, which can quickly lead to feeling like you’re a character in a Kafka novel.  Indeed, this speaks to one of the criticisms of Wright’s work: that he binds himself too tightly to a strict, mechanical view of how our minds work (see paragraph 1 above), and that he ends up boiling down an ancient, complicated mystical tradition into a self-help seminar.

In any case, today I found myself remembering of a hole-in-one that I once made in Greenville, Maine.  The train of memory went from hot summer day à the sound and smell of Maine on a hot summer day à that particular summer day in Greenville.  I must have been around 12 or 13, because I remember my father was on the balcony holding my sister Amanda who was a baby at the time, and he was watching me play the par 3 behind our condo over and over again, and I remember him cheering when one of my shots bounced onto the front of the green, rolled about 25 feet, and dropped into the cup.  And I thought about my thinking about this memory, and I didn’t think of it as dukkha / desire for past glory.  My thoughts instead went to how proud my father must have felt to see his (quite young) son do that.  A similar pride that I feel when I think about my daughters girls doing the things they do and being the people they are.  In other words, experiencing this memory while meditating made me experience it through a more empathic lens.   (July 4^th, Geneva) 

3.       Meditating when you’re really tired or sleep-deprived is pretty much a waste of time.

You would think that it might be okay because you’re all “relaxed,” but all you do is spend 20 minutes trying not to fall asleep and feeling that electric jolt in the back of your neck every time you fail and your chin bounces off your suprasternal notch.  (July 7^th, Geneva)

4.       However, meditating when you’re a little bit tired can be kind of cool, even if it’s not so “productive.”

In that situation, even if I don’t fully fall asleep (which definitely happens sometimes), the experience is less like mindful awareness and more like the kind of lucid dream you sometimes experience in peri-sleep.  Not the really cool kind of lucid dream where you can control your dream experience and fly around and stuff, but instead one where the brain symbolically sorts out the experiences of the day.  Since much of my experience for the past few days has been about cat food / medicine in small ceramic dishes (one our cats had surgery last month; she’s much better now), these were the types of images flashing through my mind.   (July 8^th, Geneva)

5.       Mortification is not all bad either.

Meditating immediately after running 5 miles in 90 degree heat is a different experience.  My exhales were sharper and deeper, not like the slow breaking of waves they usually are.  Once the air conditioner turned off, I acutely noticed the cacophony / symphony of sounds in my apartment, and I could make out several unique ones.  There were, in stereo, sounds like an engine idling at a distance.  There was the ringing of my ears.  There was a kind of subtone, like a faint, low-pitched moan.  Every once in a while the oven would snap as it preheated.  And every once in a while footfalls would thud from somewhere else in the building.  (July 11^th, Cambridge, MA) 

6.      Meditating on a moving TGV to Paris is difficult, especially when the other three seats of the four-seater compartment you’re in are occupied by French guys speaking excitedly about the World Cup.

7.       When entering a meditation center, remember to remove your shoes.

I left the apartment at 6:30 to take a Blue Bike to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center near Central Square.  Taking the bike was not the best idea, as I had broken a healthy sweat by the time I got there, but fortunately there was at least one dock left at the nearest Blue Bike station thing so I didn’t have to rush the rest of the way and I still arrived a little early.

The Cambridge Insight Meditation Center is located in an old Victorian house veiled by several low-limbed trees, on Broadway in a cluster of New Agey establishments: next door is the office of Jungian therapist I saw for a while, and is also home to several other “spiritual” type outfits: studios for yoga, and Pilates (which for some reason gets lumped in with a bunch of New Agey things, but really doesn’t deserve to be), and something called “Authentic Voice Finding” (which almost certainly does). 

I thought the place might be closed, as it looked pretty dark when I walked up, but the front door was open, and there was a light on, so I walked in.  There was a 70-something woman with long grey hair in a bun kind of pacing around.  She stood in front of the stairs for a while, and I thought she might be blocking the way so no one went in early (?), but then she said she was considering whether to take the stairs or elevator.  She ended up taking the elevator, and I walked up to the third floor, where the “morning drop-in meditation” was scheduled to take place.  The temperature got hotter as I went up, but mercifully there was AC in the large meditation hall on the top floor of the house.  A big open space under vaulted ceilings.  Polished wood floors with a small stage in the front, on which sat a mid-sized Buddha statue (there were smaller ones on the windowsills at each landing on the way up the stairs), and a bell gong (is this what these are called?  I say “bell gong” to show that it’s big and hollow and heavy, and to differentiate it from the big round flat gong that rock drummers used to have behind them in the 1970s), and a couple other small objects which I forget now.  Emanating from this small stage were several rows of cushions, arranged in an arc and facing the stage, and hemmed in by a back row of chairs.  At the entryway there were a bunch of cushions and small wooden stool-like things that I couldn’t immediately identify the function of.  I was the first one in the room.

I had realized on the way upstairs that the woman with the bun had had no shoes on, and it occurred to me that I had probably committed a faux pas by not taking my shoes off right at the front door.  I quickly took them off and put them under a chair at the side of the room under my backpack. I did a couple tours of the room, looking out the windows on three walls.  A couple minutes before 7, people started arriving.  A tall fit-looking guy in cargo shorts and a t-shirt, probably in his 50s.  Another slightly older guy, smaller.  A couple of middle-aged women who looked like they belonged in a meditation center.*  A younger guy with a bald head and a beard and thick-rimmed glasses.  A younger woman with her hair in a ponytail who wouldn’t have been out of place at Orange Theory, except she seemed to move a little more gracefully, but maybe I projected this onto her.  Anyway I had already taken off my glasses in anticipation of meditating (I’m not exactly sure why I do this, but since my eyes are closed they serve no purpose), so I couldn’t really see anyone well.  No one greeted anyone else.

I was kind of waiting for someone to show up and kick things off, but people just started sitting down, so I did too.  Everyone seemed to have their own particular system: the younger guy sat on a chair to my left, with a pillow placed behind his lower back.  One of the middle-aged women was in lotus position on a cushion on the floor.  Another was on one of the wooden stools, kneeling with her calves under her (I believe this may be called “Japanese-style”).  The other men just sat in chairs, so that’s what I did, thinking that 45 minutes on a cushion on the floor might end with me unable to stand up and walk.  At one point the fit guy reached forward to touch one of the mats, and I thought he was going to relocate down there, as if his time on the chair was just for warming up or something (?), but he only straightened the mat so it formed a neat arc with the rest of the cushions in that row.  It was already a minute or so past 7, so I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing, as I’ve been doing for the past two weeks.

Almost immediately, I heard to my right gurgling sounds emanating from the midsection of the old woman from downstairs, who had taken the chair next to me.  My initial reaction was annoyance, as if this was going to be “a distraction from my meditation.”  But almost right after that, I had the thought that there was nothing for me to be annoyed about.  These noises were not her fault obviously, and her stomach was just doing what it should be doing. 

I noticed the other noises in the room.  The Dopplered shoosh of cars going by.  The low whoosh of the air conditioning.  Higher-pitched hissing from the ringing in my ears (perhaps I should get this checked out).  The occasional gentle noise of the other meditators shifting around or clearing their throats. 

At some point I noticed the weight of my feet on the floor, as if I could feel gravity’s pull more profoundly.  I noticed this in my ass too, but maybe it was just starting to hurt from sitting on the chair for so long.  I didn’t really try to pay close attention to time.  My thoughts drifted to things I needed to do that day, or sometime soon, or to other things other than now.  And then I would try to guide myself back to my breathing again.  I don’t remember much other than that.

I started a bit at the sound of the gong: an abrupt metallic ping that quickly dove underwater and sustained.  It rang three times, and seemed to get quieter each time.  I opened my eyes and saw that a middle-aged woman with curly hair and loose-fitting clothing was now sitting Indian-style on the stage.  She had a small wooden stick in her hand, which she had evidently used to strike the gong.  The other meditators started to stir slowly.  After a moment the woman on stage put her hands together namaste-style and everyone else followed suit.  Then everyone did a small bow.  I quickly followed along, feeling like I used to feel on one of my rare trips to the Catholic church as a child, unsure about which gesticulations to do when.  The curly-haired woman said a few words in a quiet voice which I didn’t completely make out, but I inferred that her point was that Meditation Center Members could hang around if they wanted to, but that guests like me needed to vamoose.

Down on the first floor, I picked up a couple of pamphlets and added my name to the email list.  I sat on one of the chairs next to the front stairs to put my shoes back on, and I saw some shelves on which other people had put their shoes.  The curly-haired woman sat down next to me to put her shoes on too.  She asked me “How’s it going?”  I said, “It’s going well, thanks.  How about you?”  She replied, “So far so good.”

* The irony of describing these women this way (in terms of their stereotypes, their conceptual beings, rather than their actual beings – there’s a term for this that I forget) in the context of a Buddhist activity is not lost on me.   (July 12^th, Cambridge, MA)

8.       Use caution when meditating on an airplane when seated behind some guy who wants to offer his views on “spirituality” to the guy sitting next to him.

I tried to meditate on the plane to Milan this morning, while sitting a row behind a French guy who was speaking English loudly to the guy sitting next to him, saying things like: “spirituality…can help you bring the things to you in your life that you want.”  It took every ounce of discipline I had to contain myself; and I occupied myself by trying to mentally construct the French phrase for “Would you please shut the fuck up.”

A problem with meditation sometimes is that it makes you more acutely aware of what’s going on around you, and in that period after you’ve become more acutely aware but before you can see things non-judgmentally, annoying things like the guy in front of me become even more annoying.  (July 18^th, Air Europa flight 1065, MadridàMilan)

9.       Meditation may or may not improve your tennis game.

I played 6 sets of tennis over the weekend, but I felt better physically that I would have thought.  I happened to win all six, and the small internal tournament at they organized at my club over the weekend, so maybe that helps.  I spotted the The Miracle of Mindfulness on the bookcase in the guest room the other day and brought it down and started rereading a bit.  I think I might like Thich Nhat Hahn’s approach to meditation better than Wright’s, especially his advice that one shouldn’t try looking “for” anything for the first 6 months of meditation, just focus on breathing and being aware of the mind.  Maybe that’s as far as one can go with only 20 minutes a day for a month.  And maybe that’s actually pretty far.  (July 23, 2018, Geneva)

It occurred to me while running this morning that perhaps meditation contributed to my tennis performance last weekend.  Obviously sitting for 20 minutes a day doesn’t directly do anything for one’s first serve percentage, but I did feel myself much more mentally focused during my matches.  Actually, “focused” is the wrong word, as it implies kind of a concentrated effort.  What I was doing was not thinking about things like the score, or winning, or losing, or the fact that I’m up a break and it would be a missed opportunity if the other guy broke me back.  In other words, I was in the moment.  I found myself repeating a mantra of “play *this point* well.” 

And this is actually contrary to what I had been thinking: that meditation would make me too detached or spaced-out or uncaring to do competitive sports well.  Go figure. (July 24, 2018, Geneva)

10.   When meditating directly after showering, it’s a good idea to Q-tip one’s ears beforehand, or else the water in there can get pretty distracting.

11.   Practice.

I’d been fighting a nasty gastro for the last few days, so I hadn’t found the energy to meditate again until this morning.  Perhaps it would have helped to have at least tried, but it was tough to find the strength and motivation, and, given my GI condition, a little dicey sitting cross-legged for an extended period of time.  I realized this morning that, as with anything, you get out of practice (that term itself being pretty rich and significant) when it comes to focusing on your breathing.  But then again there is a certain freshness when it comes to rediscovering basic things which start to get taken for granted when you do them every day.  And this applies to so many things: the very basic Pilates exercises that our teacher has us do after holiday breaks.  The whole-stroke drumming rudiments that Joe Morello taught me.  Indeed there is something holy in the true practice of anything, whatever that anything might be.  This is a good thing to pass onto one’s children.

Maybe the main benefit of all this comes from the discipline of just doing something healthy for 20 minutes.  It could be walking around the block, or knitting, or doing pushups, or something else.  (July 28^th, Geneva)