A friend of mine just posted on Facebook about a deck of cards to ‘help cure writer’s block for journaling.’ Made me laugh, because I have sort of the opposite problem. I feel that I will need to move a bigger place soon, just to accommodate all the journals I have filled in the past two years. Still, what can I say: cheaper than therapy.
But it got me wondering if there is maybe a deck of cards out there that helps you with meditator’s block, because that is something I experience. I largely experience it in the sense that I never ever meditate. Not at all. But, a bit like yoga, I feel that since nearly everyone in the world bangs on about how it has helped them, it could possibly help me too. I just have a complex history with the activity.
My mother once distinguished herself while meditating. I went home one day in my teens and found her asleep in one of their uncomfortable high-backed dining room chairs, halfway between the dining room and the hall. When I woke her, she sheepishly admitted that the chair placement had been advised by a meditation expert who claimed it would prevent her falling asleep while attempting to reach a state of enlightenment. I suggested she give her bed a whirl, and try not to feel bad just because she presented as a deranged old trout. She said she’d try, and not to tell anybody.
I feel that I enter deeply meditative states on the treadmill while keeping up to the beat of Underworld’s Born Slippy. But maybe I am missing the mark because they don't seem to play that one much in meditation halls. It is my opinion that they should, as it would liven things up a bit and drown out the snoring. Also those people who turn out when it gets really quiet to do very irritating things with their throats.
I feel that journaling is pretty meditative for me as well, see comments above about therapy and moving to a larger place. Also, you can drink wine while journaling, and this is generally discouraged during most meditation practices. But again, I have the uneasy sense that an activity which is within reach of most ordinary folk is somehow beyond me.
I sort of wish that meditating put me to sleep. It would come in handy at 2, 3, and 4am. But it seems to have the opposite effect on me. A kind of a methamphetamine effect. Whenever I have sat down to meditate, I have become troublingly filled with a specific sort of energy I never feel at any other time. It is an energy that says clean the mold off your shower walls with a toothbrush. Yes now!
In the end, maybe the purpose that meditation serves in my life, rather than calming my mind and centering me, is to ensure that I live in a very clean house. Could that be perhaps considered a sort of path to enlightenment? Or is it like how someone once said that women who make most of a difference in the world never have clean houses?
I’m not sure anyone ever said this, it just sounded sort of right, so I Googled it. Not for the first time, I was faintly horrified by what my Google search turned up. Dirty secrets: Why there is still a housework gender gap. I really didn’t intend to open that Pandora’s box. The Difference Between a Happy Marriage and a Miserable One: Chores. Okay, now we’re getting judgmental. Maybe I should just try cleaning my house instead of using Google to tell me how to feel about my life? What a concept!
So I just got up off my couch and tried cleaning every single tiny pane of the windows in my front door and my wonderfully huge tiny-paned windows that were a large part of the reason Jessie and I fell in love with this place and rented it while it was still primarily a building site.
Turns out, and please feel free to keep your I told you so’s to yourselves at this moment, that no amount of cleaning small-paned windows with liberal amounts of washing up liquid and kitchen towel can make up for more than two years of grime, no matter how little you want to meditate. I know that I should have newspaper and Windex, that combination works a lot better. But I thought I had the amphetamine energy going for me. Now I just have a selection of tiny window panes in various stages of smear. Ever the optimist, I am looking out at my garden through the ones that look the best. Isn’t that the way to approach life in general?
But eventually I will have to address the dirty window issue. Some of my window panes now look worse than they did with nature’s smattering of raindrops and dust. They are the clear result of someone who attempted to clean with the wrong products and a frightening attack of please-let-me-not-have-to-meditate methamphetamine rush.
The great news is, I am the parent of a teen. Eventually she will come home from whatever exciting adventures have been consuming her time this weekend. She will need something: food, water, money, a place to sleep. I will have leverage: I possess all of the above. None of them, however, are freely available to her until she has cleaned every pane of our windows so we can actually see out of them.
There are two possible outcomes to this scenario. One: my daughter diligently and effectively cleans our windows so we can see out, thereby earning herself dinner from our fridge and a place to sleep tonight. Two: my daughter negotiates a way to sleep in her own bed tonight, our windows stay dirty, I stay up late, baffled and confused, trying to devise healthy parental boundaries and wondering, sometimes aloud, what just happened? Am I enlightened yet? Jesus H. Christ, please just let me wake up and be able to see out my windows!
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