Soothing music seeps from my headphones. Trying to concentrate, I count seconds for the length of each of my breaths. That gets boring quickly. I have much more fun watching the wall, patterned in shadow. Outside, there’s the promise of the sun as the days are getting longer.
My yoga mat, when unrolled, fits neatly into the little open floor space in my dorm. It’s been getting more use lately, as I’ve begun to routinely dedicate more time to meditating. Sometimes I kneel, sitting on my heels, feet slightly splayed under my weight; I feel a dull stretch in my tightly bent knees, and hear the soft whirr of the box fan up by the window. Other times, I lay on my back, arms by my sides, palms up. I find it to be far from peaceful; I’m easily preoccupied by other matters and unable to focus — an indication that it’s not yet a well-developed habit. I took meditation up thinking it would bring me some sense of calm, but it turns out that “calm” is something that comes with practice, rather than merely the toleration of a brief guided meditation video.
I was first introduced to meditation as a kid; I was told to practice it daily at the beginning of each of my Taekwondo lessons. I was so concerned with doing it correctly that I was unable to be as chill as intended during those few minutes. I can remember squeezing my eyes closed, digging my fingertips into the tops of my legs, taking deep breaths through my nose and inattentively trying to imagine what I would be having for lunch after class. There was usually a slight hum in the air from the gym’s air conditioning unit and the sound of careful footsteps passing by. Pacing the dojang, an instructor would recite, “focus your eyes, focus your ears, focus your mind, focus your body.” For a gaggle of rowdy elementary schoolers, this served as a gentle reminder to shut up and concentrate, but as the years went on, the message remained: In order to meditate effectively, we must learn to move and speak intentionally and be engaged with the present moment.
More recently, I seemed to be missing some of that mindset’s sensibility — I didn’t care much about connecting with myself or reaching self-actualization through that. I was (and am, all too often) stuck in far-off places or fretting far-fetched things, longing for days of the past or intentionally drifting off into daydreams. These other worlds brim and spill into the turbulent present, and with it comes some detachment, then voicelessness — I get so trapped in my own head that I think I speak less. In his essay “Sitting Around,” Jim Harrison says life has proven itself to be “a great big house fire of impermanence,” and that he has turned to sitting on a tree stump in order to make peace with the moods and pains that come along with it. Apparently, sitting can be a devised haven from the disquiet.
Of course, it’s important not to lose my life to unanswered wishes or be paralyzed by indecision, endless rehearsals and illusions. To an extent, these rehearsals and illusions may be an escape from reality, but then at some point, I need to be rooted in the present — I was missing too much; my own ignorance had become unendurable. Through meditation, I suppose I was seeking some sort of self-immersion, a remedy for my stiff concentration that I lazily labeled as hardheadedness.
Instead of stump-sitting like Jim Harrison, I ended up sitting on a big rock — well, lying down, but I started out sitting. This was on the shore of Lake Michigan by Northwestern University, the Chicago skyline visible even through the gray gloom. Hefty chunks of rock had been stacked from the water up to the grass as sort of a break wall, waves crashing into them steadily, and they had been covered in colorful graffiti. My friends were scattered down the shore, snapping photos of the view. My knuckles and ears burned from the wind’s cold, but there, looking out on the lake, the day’s heaviness was gone and a sense of elation was creeping in. It was on these rocks that I fell asleep, moments later. I was likely tired from my travels, but I had considered it, at the time, to be an indication of the great peace I felt.
I sometimes wonder how much of this I may have lost (moments taking in the world around me, I mean) having my phone on me all the time and being preoccupied with its corresponding distractions and idealisms or simply failing to separate work and play, letting it all bleed together — something along those lines. It’s silly that it seems to have taken so much effort for me to have ended up on that rock, or to find myself settled down in the grass somewhere doing absolutely nothing. Those excursions, even if they’re not exactly intentional mindfulness, effectively counteract the aforementioned restlessness, disappointment, self-righteousness, delusion, etc. I like to think that if I was still a little kid, I’d sit and explore much more often, thinking nothing of it. I want that back.
I’ve found I experience this sense of freedom with swimming, the immediate silence once my head dips below the surface. In this rare kind of quiet, I could spend a morning only admiring the light dancing on the bottom of the pool, feeling the pressure of my cap over my ears, concentrating on how I was moving and breathing and nothing else. It’s meditative; I’m able to be engrossed by what I’m doing and focus. I find myself enraptured by running for this reason: The movement is redemptive. Oddly enough, it can be relaxing. With intense exercise, it’s easy to be shocked into a rhythm that the mind and body must follow. All the while, I’m conscious of where I am physically, taking hardly any time for distraction. Though I’ve encountered more tranquility through motion, I suspect I’ll still end up sitting on the floor from time to time, maybe continuing to try to learn to meditate in that way, too.
For the longest time there’s been a beat-up note card haphazardly taped to the wall next to my bed. On it are more words from Harrison, this time from one of his poems, “Spring”: “In a childhood story they spoke of a land of enchantment. We crawl to it, we short-lived mammals, not realizing that we are already there.” Reading such a thing repeatedly can feel like a derision; it’s quite a digestible message, though one that fades amid all the noise and haste. Consequently, that passage probably hasn’t pushed me to be appreciative of what’s in front of me as much as my dad had hoped it would when he wrote it down for me, years ago. And still, it remains stuck to my wall.
So, there’s value in both tuning in and tuning out. There’s this balance, you see. In my experiences, meditation’s principle — engagement with oneself and the surrounding world — may be generative and healing. I intend to not waste each day reaching for another; dreaming and doing may be simultaneous and manageable, enjoyable, even. Sometimes, it takes just a little rest or reset to get there. Meditating alone isn’t going to be what it takes to drag me out of a slump, but it’s a path I’ve explored to get closer to being comfortable with where I am and more conscious of what I’m doing. It’s slow progress, and I guess time will tell if I have the patience for it. Surely, I’ll still feel uneasy about this and that, but maybe it won’t all be as dismal as it once seemed.
Statement Columnist Evelyn Brodeur can be reached at enbrod@umich.edu.