Every few years, I determine to be a better person. My ideas are no more outrageous nor ordinary than any New Year’s resolution: Read the classics. Take smaller portions. Clean out the clutter. Read poetry. Keep up with the news. Call my parents more than once a week. Give more to charity. Floss more often. Do the damned monthly breast exam.
Most recently, I began saying I wanted to slow down, to stop rushing. I move around at warp speed; I haven’t clocked it, but its way faster than it needs to be. Now, I’ve told myself I have permission to slow down. Thich Nhat Hanh’s daily meditation book refers to this as breaking the habit of rushing. In his world, it’s not so awful that I hurry in the first place. Not something that points to an underlying flaw, something inherently messed up in my character, something that can be blamed on my often-blamed parents. Nope. Just a habit. A common human distraction. If I invited myself to slow down, I’d encounter something else common to humans: the raging/roiling/tumultuous/ grasping/discontented and discontenting inner turmoil, the endless monkey mind of thoughts, the ways in which we create our own suffering. And if I invited myself to slow down enough times, with enough practice, with something like the intent and courage to actually encounter all that’s underneath, I’d be invited to join a rarer human phenomenon – the release of suffering.
Every time I slow down, every time I plant my bottom on a bed or sofa (don’t get me started with a pillow on a hardwood floor – I have pre-arthritic knees and insufficient padding and if the Buddha and every other power to be thinks that you can only meditate on the floor, or under the Bodhi tree, it’s like religious folks saying God’s only in the church, and well, inner peace is just as likely – or unlikely – for me wherever I plant my ass) … every time I try to slow down I get as distracted as I just did. I’m an unlikely meditator. I’m a pre-eminent thinker. My thoughts beget thoughts the way biblical forefathers begot nations which begot 7 billion of us distracted mortal souls.
I’m currently doing just the smallest bit of self-awareness/ breath/meditation work. Reading and journaling and taking some time to sit and breathe and meditate with mantras and everything. So far, I still suck at it. Even as I sat down to write today I downloaded a Thich Nhat Hanh YouTube video and huffed and puffed with impatience at the 2 minutes and 29 seconds he took to sit, orient himself, ring the singing bowl once, twice, three ever-lovin’ times, quietly, slowly, non-hurriedly, setting the pace before uttering the first word of his talk.
Oh, I have a long way to go. It’s harder when I hear the rack slide from the kitchen, the sound of my husband’s footsteps as he moves around the house. As if he’s my distraction. I can make Thich Nhat Hanh my distraction. That man knows how to peel an orange, slowly savoring the sight, scent and feel of one singular orange – that man doesn’t even want to do anything else while he peels an orange for 45 minutes – imagine what he could do with my . . .
And I’m back. Instead of indulging in the anger, which according to the Buddha I won’t be punished for, but will be punished by, I breathe in and out, I let the loud metallic sounds come and go, and when I get up from the bed and go in the other room, I meet the glint in my husband’s eye as he emerges from his near-meditative state after cleaning his shotgun.