Red Cedar

I feel like I’m ready to give up on people in general. Not the people I love, not the people who support me and love me back for my intrinsic self. But I’m feeling exhausted by pretty much everyone else – and I have at least a couple of relationships in which I’ve started to feel pretty much used. I have to check this feeling because I have some social anxiety issues that pop up every once and awhile which can cause me to interpret things in unintended ways – but after months of a certain kind of treatment, I’m pretty sure I’ve detected a pattern that leaves me pretty sad and unable to keep reaching out with invitations to certain folks.

Fortunately, loss is something that comes up frequently in my meditation practice – something that comes up frequently in dharma teachings really, but my own losses are sharp sticks which I bump up against often and I’m working with them. Not exactly letting go, but living with – and I find that accepting my past deep losses more fully, instead of wishing they weren’t mine or had never happened, allows me to more quickly recognize and step away from the pain of the smaller slings and arrows that are a part of daily relations. Not only that, but the gratitude for those who have been with me on my life path for many years, my oldest friends and my current partner, grows each time I see clearly the relationships which are not characterized by a mutual trust and respect.

I don’t feel the need to be dramatic, to sever ties with words or actions which I cannot take back,  I am comfortable with the unfolding of things as they are. But it does help to realize when actions are fruitless so one doesn’t waste their energy in pursuit.

The photograph above was taken this morning on my way into work – I’ve never noticed the words on this hoarding before – but they seem appropriate to how I’m feeling right now. I’m not too afraid to let go of what isn’t working for me, not scared enough to accept poor treatment in ways that I used to just let it go. It’s these words that I’m sitting with today.

Today was day one-hundred-and-one for me – that is – days in a row that I have meditated. I have a timer on my phone that I use when I sit down to meditate, and that also keeps track of the number of days I meditate for thirty  minutes or longer. The time setting is my doing as thirty minutes feels like a minimum amount to me and something I can always fit into my schedule, though mostly these days I sit for forty-five minutes – and in retreat or at the zen-dō, much longer.

I’m not sure that there’s anything in my life that I have done unfailingly for a streak of a hundred days or more – not even flossing my teeth – so on one level it seems like a big deal to me. On another level, I know meditators who have sat every day for the last twenty years or more – and in that context, one hundred days is nothing. In a month I will be coming up on two years of practicing meditation – another milestone that is both large and small.

As usual, there was nothing particularly special about my meditation this morning – forty-five minutes of attempting to focus on my breath, and my breath alone. My mind played across all the things I am working on, delved into the problem of other people’s expectations, did some self-justifying routines about recent decisions I have made – and got pulled back in to become the breath over and over, for a few seconds at a time.

It’s not magic, this practice. And I don’t have the kind of mind that produces visions or revelatory voices – so mostly it doesn’t even feel insightful. And yet it provokes my curiosity endlessly  – glimpses of the mind in its settled state, seconds in which the mind and body integrate to create the relaxation of holism, the occasional glance over the precipice of no-self, and deep feelings of universal love that wash up at the most unexpected moments. This morning practice that I do tints every other aspect of my days as though through a filter which slows down time and reaction instead of refracting light and colour.

And so I am certain that these hundred days will be followed by another hundred, and another. I feel quite sure that this is a lifelong practice, no longer just an experiment to see what it is like. I could be wrong about that of course, but in my current thrall I can’t imagine not getting up and taking my place on the cushion each morning – never sure of what the next breath will bring.