Meditation days 270 and onward: Everywhere you go...

Sometimes the completion of a goal can feel like its unravelling, the complete incorporation of a new skill its dismissal…

There is a letting go, it seems. And there we are again, just ourselves, seemingly back where we started. I hate the saying: “everywhere you go, there you are.”

Because it’s not true. And yet… I said to my wife tonight I am scared of my sadness; scared of its persistence. I feel lost, and I do often. Even as my son is soon to arrive (due August 16). Even as I landed a dream job in a dream town, even as I am married to the partner of my dreams.

The stars were lovely tonight, and a cold front has blown past Lawrence. What felt like a record-setting heat wave has been shoved aside and we now have before us a week of sub-90s temperatures. Bliss. The wind still blows, though. And though the fireflies flash a little slower from the lower temps, it is still summer.

We are still who we are. And yet. Day 270 in my meditation journey came, and I sat with it. I held the event in my mind and spun it around, observed it, compared it to my expectations of it. It was a let down. By that time I was I believe in a rut — showing up and “doing the work” in the same manner in which I quaff my vitamins each night. And night time was — is — when I meditate now. In bed, before lights out. There are nights when I wake up at 2 a.m. with my earbuds in, the phone glowing, the session finished and the departing message for the day awaiting my dismissing tap.

I don’t sit with these moments.

I feel a little bemused myself at myself… How fast I have grown. Maybe I am mourning that I am no longer growing for myself, of myself. Maybe I’ve known all along that, even though my son has not arrived, the torch is passed. The summer heat has given way, and I am in the odd reprieve of an unsettling, out-of-season cold front — the approach of middle age.

And day 360? 365? I didn’t realize that I had meditated for a solid year straight, without missing a day, until about day 370. I was greatly saddened upon the realization. But, I say, I have a child coming, and a new town and job to acquaint myself with. And a marriage in which to root myself… And yes, these are good words, good cause, each of these, for anyone to lose track of time.

And maybe that’s the message. I have built time. I am facing a period of my life in which I will be building time: Months will become years. Or, rather, years will pass like months now, or so I suspect parenting effects this temporal shift. I see it on the faces of the parents we know: the bemused sadness of “how fast they grow.”

I feel a little bemused myself at myself… How fast I have grown. Maybe I am mourning that I am no longer growing for myself, of myself. Maybe I’ve known all along that, even though my son has not arrived, the torch is passed. The summer heat has given way, and I am in the odd reprieve of an unsettling, out-of-season cold front — the approach of middle age.

Maybe I let go of the milestones — day 270 and 365 — even as I accepted, somewhere down in myself, quietly, that this was work that needed to be done, this practice of meditation. This calming, this sitting with myself not for myself, but for my wife, and my child. And, maybe, someday his children. Maybe milestones are for children, and the practice, maybe that is for who we grow into. Who we become.

My reason for being, my Joni, carrying our first son, Jack.

#Aging #Mindfulness #Loveandrelationships #Slowliving #Spirituality