works of wanderlust

Hey. This isn’t my first mythic quest for enlightment. I’ve jumped on the whole mediation bandwagon time and again over the course of my life. Sitting still. Breathing. Realizing my eyes are dancing around behind my eyelids and wondering if that’s normal while little gong noises play from the speaker on my phone.

Okay, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. Probably. Definitely.

Cuz see, meditation is supposed to be good for you, and not just in a wibbly wobbly new agey kind of way, either. Mentally focusing. Resetting your own thoughts. Mindfulness. Personal awareness. Turning down the volume of life. Turning out the stress. Turning off the screen for a few minutes, if nothing else.

But sticking to a meditation schedule is not as simple as it sounds at first. I mean, unless I ship off to an ashram and live some kind of autere life, finding inner peace in the Canadian suburbs just as the summer fun season is kicking off is decidedly more challenging than that. I needed a plan. And to suit that plan, I dcided I should get started with a clear goal. An experiment. How many days in a row could I set aside at least ten minutes to meditate?

Here’s how it went…

Day 1

Okay. I’m all set. Kinda.

I propped myself up in a quiet corner of the bedroom, sat facing away from the door and dimmed the light. I tried to quiet my mind and… my wife walked in and asked me for the amazon password. *sigh*

Ok. Bad start.

Instead I decided to focus my focus. I recall I used to have some app on my phone that was semi-free and was solid enough for my needs. Quickly I redownloaded that and set up a new account while I was at it. Hey, we’re starting fresh here, right? Two minutes later my headphones are plugged in my ears and I’m sitting back there on the floor facing away from the door, a quiet voice in my headphones telling me to get comfortable and relax my posture while focusing on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. And it goes on like this for a few minutes, all good, but I can hear the teevee in the other room and my foot is starting to tingle because it’s falling asleep and…

Focus needs work. And maybe I should shut the door next time. Oh, and a pillow or something.

I’ll make some tweaks to the plan tomorrow. Fifteen minutes later and it seems that my zen is still on order.

Day 2

I have other “important” stuff going on this evening and rather than feel rushed I decided to try out an afternoon meditation session, descending down in the quieter basement while everyone else was out for an hour or so.

So there I went. Another fifteen minutes of sitting still and within five minutes while I’m supposed to be focusing on my breathing all I can focus on is my itchy toe, and my itchy nose, and my itchy earlobe and geezers it always this cold in the basement? I mean, I’m not expecting enlightenment on day 2 but I figured I’d at the very least be able to sit still for more than sixty seconds in a row. Boy, was I wrong.

Day 3

The house is quieter. Normal non-weekend life has resumed and the family is off at their dance classes, so I have a couple quiet hours with the house to myself.

I’m not going to log every day of this, by the way. At some point this log is going to start skipping days, maybe even a week, but unless I fall off my meditation cushion and miss a day I won’t necessarily report on this quest for mindfulness. Partly that’s because it’s going to get repetitive, but the other reason is that guess what I sat there thinking about for fifteen minutes today: this. I had a little narrative running through my mind planning out what I was going to write as my entry for today. Congrats, dude, you just discovered another way to think about working. Multitasking is probably not the point.

I set the timer for a simple fifteen minutes session and sat there, thoughts of my breath and my blog running through my head. The only one less settled than I was the dog, who seemed a little preturbed that I was sitting on the floor but had no interest in playing with her ball. Enlightenment eludes for yet another day, he writes sarcastically and knowing that nothing is ever that simple.

Day 4

My mind is awash with grey noise.

I sat still for fifteen minutes in the late morning today having set my timer and settled onto the floor once again. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath and ignore the itch on the tip of my nose.

The biologist in me explains it as some kind of neural cooldown. Optic nerves dealing with the lack of input and turning boredom into randomness. I sat there with my eyes closed and there was not darkness: there was static, a subtle static of dark hues, browns and oranges and blues so deep that they would be mistaken for black save but the twitching of my brain to the contrary. And I afraid to open my eyes to ruin the emergent light show watched as the static rippled like the tides upon a pond and then blossomed into shimmering rings of fire dropping away into infinity which then dissolved into flickers of hallucinated electric shocks from the edge of my vision, my eyelids hung relaxed and fighting the urge to open as the minutes passed before the chime rung once more from my phone.

Day 6

I have been reading one of the Sam Harris books on meditation and one of the first things that stuck out for me was the notion (tho I’m paraphrasing here) that meditating doesn’t need to mean cosplaying as a Buddhist monk. The concept of western-style meditation can just mean finding a quiet place to sit and practice refocusing and re-centering the mind, honing in on the breath. To me, this means losing that attention about ten times per minute and then trying to reel it back in each time. He explained it like, I dunno, pushups. You just do lots of pushups until eventually you are good at doing pushups, but you don’t expect your first, hundredth, or even your thousandth pushup to be some gloriously perfect pushup. It’s just the work of doing all those pushups that brings you closer to doing better pushups… and the strength follows.

To that end, I found myself leaving the cross-legged position of my bedroom floor and for the last two days I have been out and about in nature, finding quiet places off the beaten path to sit and practice for fifteen minutes at a go.

Day 8

I have been unprepared these last couple of days, by which I mean that I sat down in a quiet place to do the mindfulness thing and within two minutes of the timer starting my throat got all chalky and clammy and, you know what, I am really thirsty. Why didn’t I drink a glass of water before I started this, huh? Note to self: drink a big glass of water before I start next time.

Day 11

The habit is falling into place. I mean, it is not yet simple nor easy, but I have found a kind of rhythm to the little blocks of time that I allocate to myself for this practice. And yet, here is the rub: I think I am just finding a new way of doing something I’ve already been doing for years.

I have occasionally used the word “meditative” to describe running. This evening I went out to run club. I had already logged my fifteen minute mindfulness session earlier in the day, and as the evening pressed on I met up with the group for an hour of trail running. For about ten minutes I found myself running for a stretch alone, a few of the people a minute or so behind me and a pair of runners about a minute ahead. I haven’t been doing much solo running lately, and then there I was, with ten minutes of just me and the trail… and I was darting along, eyes wide open, focusing on my breathing, thinking about nothing much at all, and it struck me just how meditative those solo moments on the trail can be.

So maybe it isn’t entirely strange that I find myself sinking into a familiar sort of feeling sitting with my eyes closed, focusing on my breathing and clearing my mind. The only thing really missing from these recent sessions is the trail, after all.

Day 14

Just through a busy weekend and squeezing in time for mindfulness is when there are places to be and schedules to keep is not very meditative. I found myself pinching in two sessions at inconvenient moments and then fighting the focus fight, trying to bring that newly practiced attention muscle to bear on the moment but fighting the agenda-scraping mental blur that was whirling in my head of thinking this is just another task I need to accomplish today. Counter-productive? I dunno. I need to reflect on if it helped or if it was merely performative for the app streak. Yikes.

Day 20

I feel a bit performative. It’s been a busy busy busy week with all the goings on around the end of school for The Kid and and I’ve been squeezing in these meditative activities in the cracks of life.

Part of me is okay with this. That’s the point. I tried going back to listening to the guided meditations in my app (the free ones, because I’m not quite ready to pay for this experiment yet!) and they all try to assure me in a calm soothing voice that the whole point is to find five or ten minutes of calm in a hectic day, but my racing mind is nagging me about the dangers of seeking quick fixes for complex problems. My unsettled mind seems like a complex problem and a soothing voice in an app does really seem like a quick fix.

Day 23

I haven’t mentioned this, I don’t think so at least, but every single one of the last twenty two days of meditation have been, no matter where… sitting.

Small detail. Sure.

But today I thought I would mix things up and try one laying down on my back. Does it make a difference. I mean, I decided again to lean into one of the guided meditations in my app—there is either just a timer with chimes or there are podcast-like tracks of people telling you affirmations and breathing exercises and on and on—and the voice in my ears told me to find a comfortable position either sitting or laying down on my back, so I opted for the latter.

There really are not any rules.

I mean, I’ve been lurking in the shadows of latent skepticism about this whole thing, if I’m being honest. I have been side-eyeing the rational part of my brain telling me that there is purpose in method and method in a larger picture of what this is and that isn’t wrong it’s just not clear what the details are doing to the foundations of the larger picture of this thing. Do this. Or that. Whatever. It’s groovy. Just breath or don’t or both. You pick. My skeptic senses are tingling today, and I can’t help but tell you that no matter how clear my mind might feel—or usually just gently vibed—I’m not entirely conviced this road leads to enlightnment so much as a subscription to an expensive app.

Day 26

I wrote a longer article today about that earlier revelation I had connecting my meditative running experience with this whole sitting and meditating thing. To be honest, as the month nears its end I think I do prefer the feets version of this seeking zen.

Day 28

I’ve decided that twenty-eight days equals a month.

This mythic quest, a personal experiment in search of pop cultural enlightenment has reached a kind of natural end I think.

And what then are my conclusions?

Look, I set out to find a kind of mindfulness in the cracks of my day. I knew going in that I had tried this before. I had played with the mental exercises that were meant to build focus and balance the mind and relax the soul. These, I still believe, are all good for us. We live in this frenzied world of social media doom-scrolling and never-ending attention seeking AI algorithms that are endlessly patient to prey upon our limited attention. Any ability we foster, any effort we make, any strength we seek to build our resistance against this is good.

And maybe, just maybe, my two-bit attempt at finding all that in an app or method that was itself was always bumping at me to subscribe or rate it or rate a guided session to which I just partook, maybe, just maybe, and maybe more than maybe, that was not the right approach.

I spent the majority of the month using nothing other than the timer inside the app to find what I had set as default: fifteen minutes of mindfulness… to which the same app would collect my meditation stats and add to my streak and ask me to set goals. I assume all those yogis and far off folks seeking enlightenment through these similar methods are totally posting their meditation bonafides on their tiktoks, right? No. I don’t want to blame an app trying to do the right thing, but it is easy to get cynical when the end game was always giving me vibes of monetizing my mindfulness. So… there’s that.

But in the end what I think of the whole thing, from quiet moments in nature to surreal mental light shows from an under-stimulated brain to distractions by the dog or the family or the wasps flying around my bare kneecaps in the park or anything… it was an effort and it was… ok.

I also realize that I find mindfulness in other ways in my life: walking through nature, running along rainy trails, reading in the park, and making art as I focus on light and colour and lines. Parking myself on a cushion and closing my eyes is alright, but it didn’t bring me peace or enlightenment.

It brought me a great big shrug.

The modern meditation movement, after participating with faith for one month is like the protein shake of the healthy eating movement: a quick fix in a bottle with glitzy branding. What we all just need to do, and I already have been, is eat a balanced diet and live our lives.

Will I go sit in the park with my eyes closed again? Of course. But I’m bringing along a sketchbook and some music, too.