When I forget to sit

I haven’t sat properly for a week or two.

By sitting, I obviously don’t mean just sitting. I have sat plenty: at multiple all-day events, in public transportation, on a trans-Atlantic flight. Plenty of time to sit in ill-designed seats that make my back want to scream.

When I say sitting I mean meditating: I haven’t taken the time to sit for my usual 20 minutes in the morning for a couple of weeks. I tell myself it is because I have been busy, which is objectively true. But it is not the whole truth. I have definitely had 20 minutes of downtime here and there, and at those times I have prioritized doing a crossword puzzle or making more coffee or knitting or reading the news. When it comes right down to it, at first I didn’t sit because I felt too agitated, and then I didn’t sit because I got out of the habit and it just seemed too hard to start again.

And so this morning, as I dropped the pillows on the floor and arranged my feet just so, it was with a certain degree of apprehension: what will I find when my mind returns to my body? What arises when all else is still? At the most basic level: am I still here?

Spoiler-alert: yes, I am still here. But if you expect a paragraph now describing magical insights and instant enlightenment, I am about to disappoint you. Nothing happens when I sit. That is sort of the point.

Today I was struck with the instant expansiveness of my mind when I close my eyes, and the almost immediate closing in when I open them again. The depth of my breathing as I sat in meditation, and its shallowness as I moved to the couch to write. Almost as if I am only able to truly dream, truly innovate, when I am simultaneously hyper present and not really there at all. And maybe these are general truths: we need stillness to move and quiet to hear. We need to know where we are before we can decide whether to stay or to go.

But there is something underneath this that I am only slowly grasping. Something about the ephemeral nature of concreteness, the push-and-pull between the mind-body complex as dreamer and implementer, all at once, all mixed together. A call to embrace indeterminacy, ambiguity, and change. An urgent need to sit in it, literally and figuratively at the same time.

The sun is awake now. And so am I.