My meditation practice has gotten sloppy lately. There was a while there, a few months ago, when I meditated half an hour a day or more, pretty regularly. Lately it has been at best a lot less than that – fifteen or twenty minutes is doing well – and half the days last week I never meditated at all. Maybe more than half. Some of those days I just slept in and then had to get moving to get to work. Other days I found myself sitting idly during the time I would have meditated – so far, so good – but thumbing through a book. As a result, when I sat down with my sangha tonight for a twenty-minute sit, my mind was all over the place and it seemed like a long, long time.
I wonder a little bit, though, about this business of thumbing through a book. Often I wasn't paying it much attention. Generally I didn't bother to put on my glasses, and these days it is hard for me to read print without them. (Getting old.) And invariably it was something I had read before. So while my eyes were running over the words and my mind was hearing them said, I wasn't putting a lot of effort into any of it. I wasn't learning anything new, or having to follow a storyline. I wasn't trying to figure out whodunit. And so in a sense I was using the book as a tool for shifting into neutral and letting my engine idle.
I've treated books this way for as long as I can remember. When I was applying to colleges, one of them asked for an essay on how I relate to books. I still remember writing that I would pick up a book in an idle moment to thumb through it, then sink deeper and deeper into it until I would finally – if I let myself – become oblivious to the outside world. What I didn't add is that the books I sank into in this way were books I had already read. But they were. I have always treated books as friends, or as comfortable places of refuge; and I revisit the same ones over and over.
Could this possibly be some kind of meditation practice after all? Certainly it's not "pure" meditation, whatever that means. The presence of the book, of the written text, does steer my mind in this direction rather than that one. I'm not exactly being present with whatever arises.
What I am doing, though, is disengaging from the noise of the world, from its driving and shaping, its pushing and pulling, its desire and aversion and confusion. When I enter the book I leave all that behind. And because it is a book I already know, the demands it places on me are less: I don't have to feel that the book itself is trying to drive and shape me, because we're already friends so I know what to expect. I know that the book will accept me as I am and that I can accept the book for what it is … because otherwise I would have picked up a different book. So there is a lot of striving, fretting, craving, that I can just give up while I am in the charmed circle cast by the book.
It may not be meditation, but it is something kind of close. In any event I'm not going to fret about not meditating. Just pick myself up, climb back on my cushion, and do it again. I do find it interesting, though, that this is yet one more behavior (like going out for long walks) which I developed all on my own decades ago, which turns out to have something in common with contemplative practice. It's as if I needed meditation all my life, and had to make it up for myself during all the long years before I learned it from somebody else.
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