Covid has obviously impacted essentially every person on the planet. It has devastated families and taken millions of lives and livelihoods. There is a dark pool of undiagnosed depression and anxiety in far too many places that will have to be addressed eventually. For my immediate family, fortunately, the impact has simply been to force us into a long period of uneasy self-isolation. Patience is the only path forward. Normalcy is attempted via virtual calls, imagined hugs, and videos of past live music performances. This writing is not to minimize the pain and loss all around, it is simply to share a single nugget of beautiful Yin in this endless sea of Yang.
One thing that I decided to add to my daily routine that has really stuck is meditating every morning. If possible, it is one of the first things of the day and integrated into my morning walk. I have learned recently from a wise man that mediation is not presence, it is returning to presence. That concept lit me up. I was on a high for over a day once having received that suggestion. I no longer had to fear meditating. I had feebly attempted to practice meditating for most of my life but was so distraught to find that my mind seemed unable to be quieted for as short of a span of time as one minute. I felt closeted. I have likely meditated thousands of times. I have yet to ever be able to achieve perfect stillness of thought for sixty seconds I believe (I know, perfect isn’t real anyway).
Considered from this new perspective, my practice is some of the most fruitful imaginable. I am so blessed to have such a monkey brain. I literally have limitless opportunities to return to presence. While working for decades now to try to quiet my mind I feel as if I am exactly where I started. Maybe I am. Maybe that is wonderful? Maybe it is irrelevant. Maybe I took ten thousand steps forward and ten thousand and three steps backwards. Maybe I’ve been marching in a spiral. Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe I have been meditating continuously for decades and all this “reality” is a single night’s dream or a discontinuous flickering in and out while meditating in a noisy train station.
It is the journey. It cannot be the destination. Is there a “why” wrapped up here somewhere in these flaky buttery gossamer veils?
One particular space that I have found myself in lately as I “flicker” in and out of presence, much like a light switch with a loose wire, is the concept of a universe devoid of everything. A perfectly empty universe. Maybe it is expanding, maybe contracting, maybe still. But there is no life in it. There is no consciousness. There is no pain or beauty. There is no John Coltrane or first kisses or hemorrhoids. It is not that the Uyghur are safe, it is that they never existed. There are no late fees accruing on library books without a home. There is not even math. The vast knowledge necessary to build the seemingly limitless circuit boards in every industrialized household is, poof, gone. That was a lot of work to learn all those fancy things and build those unnatural factories to attempt to assemble little Gods. Poof. It was never about the destination. If life were to coalesce out of this parallel place billions of years hence would smart phones still be an eventual inevitability? Would Apple be called Banana? Would they curiously have sharp pointy corners?
Flicker. For a brief moment I can return to this familiar and comforting nothingness of my childhood. Lying in bed looking at the odd patterns of light on the ceiling of my youth and doing exactly that. Traveling to a place where not even I am present. If something were to coalesce out of the nothing of this strange place would it eventually become exactly this? Would it even be recognizable? Would the “laws” of physics be the same? Did they cease to exist during that terrifyingly perfect period of nothingness? Has it happed ten billion times already? Does that happen for the flickering moments of stillness in my head? Are addition and gravity and reversion to the mean suspended? It is addictive. I cannot wait to feel calm enough to return tomorrow morning.
