869.
An unremarkable number, really.
I would've preferred 1,000. Or 1,001 – that's a solid number. A palindrome. A collection worthy of global recognition. One Thousand and One Meditative Nights I could have called my second book.
Alas.
By the time I reach such a streak, it will be 2028. Because I meditated for eight hundred and sixty-nine days in a row before one day... I forgot.
The irony?
The day I forgot to meditate was the day after I found out I'd been accepted into meditation teacher training.
The next morning, I opened Insight Timer, the phone app I use to track my meditations.
My jaw dropped as I saw the pop-up to retroactively log a meditation and "save my streak." I've seen this prompt before; it happens whenever I fly and I log meditations in airplane mode. But this time, I wasn't expecting it.
I rack my brain. Did I meditate yesterday? I open Google Calendar to see what I had done, hoping to recall a window of time where I sat with my eyes closed, observing the thoughts and sensations of my mind and body.
I let out a sigh as I realize what I had done. Well, not done.
I navigate back to Insight Timer. I stare at the screen, tempted to tap the button "Yes, I did." I put my phone down indecisively, and scrunch my mouth in thought.
Beginner's Mind.
The image that comes to mind is the face of an elderly Japanese Zen Buddhist master. He taps his temple with his crinkly index finger as he raises an eyebrow and cracks a sly smile.
I pick my phone up and quickly tap "No, I didn't" before I can change my mind. I set the phone back down and run my fingers through my hair.
I did it. Wow.
I'm really starting over.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
-Marcel Proust
If I'm being honest, I'd been going through the motions for months.
Meditation, for me, is best done in the morning, but I'd joined a few run clubs and started using that as an excuse to push it to the afternoons.
Of course I'd forget to meditate in the afternoons and remember at 10 PM – right as I was going to bed. Great for falling asleep, but not so much for the point of meditation – which for me, is to remind me to carry a sense of presence and peace throughout my day.
I set an afternoon alarm as a reminder to stop what I was doing and take the time to check in and reset. That worked – until I got in the habit of dismissing it.
The day I "forgot" was actually just a day like any other where I hit snooze three times until I dismissed it altogether so that I could keep doing whatever it was that I was doing that I had deemed more important.
Except on this day, by bedtime I did, actually, forget.
I forgot – but I also made a choice to forget.
The lesson here is not so much in the forgetting, but in the choice, and the truth it carries about the way that I've been approaching life.
I work remarkably hard for someone who earns almost no money for her efforts.
This is an old habit.
This is an approach to life that gotten me in trouble before.
This is one of the reasons I stopped working in the first place. I didn't know how to not work myself to the point of brokenness. And I'm about to do it again, if I don't figure out how to change my relationship to life.
I don't know any other way to be than to do.
"To be, or not to be, that is the question" – but is it? This choice of words never actually made sense to me, because it's not the question Hamlet is asking at all. This is a doing question, not a being question. Hamlet isn't asking whether to exist – he's asking how to act: end his life, or avenge his father's death. Absolutely nothing about his subsequent actions point to this ever being a question of being with his suffering. To be with your grief is not to willfully wound your loved ones with hurtful words, and wind up in a pool of blood while fighting for revenge.
But this is about me, not Hamlet, or it's about both of us, because really, instead of being, we're doing, and no matter what we do, the outcome is still the same.
Hamlet didn't drink the poison to end his life. So he became the poison.
I know the feeling.
"Rotting from the core" is how I described the feeling of being in my body to doctors who looked at me with puzzled faces when I listed my symptoms.
On the outside, I looked youthful, fit. "You should be healthy," is a phrase I got used to hearing from men in white coats.
"But I'm not."
Physical symptoms aside – perhaps you can relate to the experience of appearing on the outside like everything is fine when on the inside everything is not, in fact, fine?
The problem for most of us, myself included, is that our pretense for the sake of others fools ourselves. Say "I'm fine" enough and you convince yourself that you are – or you should be – and when you finally call for help, it's too late. You've been pretending to be fine for so long that you burnout, get sick, blow up, say and do things you regret, and if this were a Shakespearean play? You'd fight everyone around you to the death and regret everything in a last poetic breath.
Well, I'm done pretending.
Which is why I'm admitting that in the last few months, I've had little, teeny, tiny symptoms cropping up, the kind that in the past I would have ignored until I wound up in the emergency room.
Not this time. This time, I'm listening.
And this has everything to do with meditation.
Meditation is not just sitting on a cushion with your eyes closed focused on your breath or a mantra.
Meditation is an approach to life. A state of being in the world that I have tasted before, but recently forgot. Surrendering to life exactly as it is, and greeting each new day not as a challenge, but as an adventure.
“If your mind is empty…it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki
"Beginner's Mind" – or shoshin, in Japanese – describes a Zen Buddhist attitude of openness and curiosity to life. The idea is that our suffering comes from a fixed notion of the way life should be, how our day should go, and resisting the gift that it is – and the possibilities that it holds.
Children are best at this, because they're beginners at everything and free of life's conditioning that traps our adult brains into a fixed notion of how life should be. It's why a number of scientific studies have shown children to be better at solving unconventional problems than adults – because adults are too busy trying what should work, while children try everything that could.
It's not just that life feels better with a beginner's mind. It's that we're actually missing out on exploring the full spectrum of what life has to offer because we've convinced ourselves that we already know how everything works.
Perhaps it's why the highly educated men in the white coats could never quite tell me what was wrong with me – because they couldn't see the problem outside of the expert lens that both enhanced and limited their perspective. Once I started experimenting on myself, as a beginner? The solution was obvious.
I am once again exploring making some big changes to how I approach my relationship with my body. I'm tired of feeling like I'm swimming against the current of life. When you swim against the current, you stay in exactly the same place. It's time to see what life looks like floating down the lazy river.
I start meditation teacher training next week, and I couldn't be more thrilled.
Every day is an opportunity to begin again.
*This story will be continued in a future newsletter.
