I have no idea what time it is. I’m wide awake, lying in bed, listening to the rhythmic breathing of a husband and a dog. I decide to try something I’ve not historically been great at: meditation. I feel the beating of my heart. I hear an owl call. My thoughts begin to filter in. I know I’m supposed to notice them and let them go. My lack of skill in this area is largely responsible for my unspectacular meditations.
However, on this particular night (or is it the wee hours of the morning?) something is different. Besides the breathing of two humans and a dog, the room and my mind are very still.
So, there in the dark, when that all-too-familiar regret surfaces, I release it, effortlessly. In comes an ambitious yearning…I salute it and send it packing. A gripping fear…noticed and dissolved. I felt very much present in that beautiful darkness! A profound feeling of peace washed over me. It was nothing short of miraculous! And before a full minute elapsed, another sensation rushed in…
Boredom.
That sense of peace was really nice and all, but, well, other than that, there just wasn’t much going on. Without all my stories to alternately entertain me and cause me excruciating emotional pain, there was frankly, just not enough to keep me occupied.
I began to wonder…
Perhaps we humans, while evolving our complex psychology back in the Stone Age, started making up these stories in our heads, simply to fill the minutes, the hours, the days. Perhaps as Hunter/Gatherers, along with learning to weave baskets and make rudimentary tools, we began…reliving happy memories, maybe we joyfully anticipated upcoming events; and we also learned how to lament our egregious mistakes, chew on wrongs done unto us, and indulge the what-ifs that scared the bejesus out of us.
How very clever and creative we were!
So, what do I do now? I wondered. I wanted to take this new clarity, my own personal theory of the evolution of the monkey mind, with me into my upcoming days and nights. I wondered if perhaps it’s enough to just notice when I am getting ‘creative’ in the moment. And make some choices. Do I want to make up a story about collapsing world economies, or do I want to make some cupcakes? Do I continually regurgitate those nightmarish adventures in parenting, or do I put my energy into resolving a conflict in the workplace?
If I find myself ruing over somebody’s carelessness with words lodged firmly in my craw, perhaps I can use my vivid imagination to transform the moment. What if I pretend I am in an earlier stage of my soul’s evolution, crouched by the bank of a gently flowing brook, collecting bull rushes for a basket in another lifetime. Instead of reconjuring ad nauseum the painful offending incident like my modern self might, or imagining ways I could exact revenge on the offender, perhaps with a sense of wonder and innocence, I might simply take delight in noticing something brand new, “Oh! This is what righteous indignation feels like. Wow! Cool. And this is a ladybug…nice!”
So, I’m not sure if I’ve actually gotten any better at meditation. What started out as a meditation, ended up to be more of a musing. After all, within a few minutes I was concocting a story about the evolution of the messy modern mind. If that’s not amusing, I don’t know what is!
Maybe it was a combination of the two…a muse-itation.
Not perfect, but as Voltaire mused, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” And that’s good enough for me, for now. In this moment.
And my muse-itating beat the heck out of where my mind has often gone before, on any number of previous sleepless nights.
Contributed by Colleen McCarthy-Evans
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