On meditating

 Back in Grad school when times were real tough because of the workload was the first time I started doing meditation. I went to the meditation club at the school, sometimes twice a week, sometimes once, and the hour, hour-and-half spent there did really help me clear my mind. In all honesty I can't say if it was the meditation or what may have been the unintentional naps that made me feel refreshed but every evening coming out of those doors on the seventeenth floor and top of our dining halls, I felt a energetic man, ready to take on the world. This was great because I was always tired, stressed, anxious and an empty husk of a human being going in.

Since then I've not meditated seriously at length except for the couple of hours I've spent with JD in between. Not enough discipline, I've told myself and others who've asked, I'll do it one day when I'm more serious about life, and in a more disciplined phase. Well life has been passing me by, and real quick at that in these rough Covid times, and I dont' seem to be improving on either of those things. Discipline has troughs and crests though I seem to never be motivated enough to go as far as meditation, and the 'seriousness' is never going to come if I wait for the day of declaration of adulthood. I have to suck it up and start doing.

If you've been an irregular reader here at least, and I know you are because I can see in the traffic logs that you've not visited the site in recent days what's up with that we need to talk, you will remember that I always talk about starting meditation, making plans for it, but actually never execute it. It's in the top five things I really want to do and should be doing, and yet it never gets done. There's never enough motivation, never enough push.

Things have changed a little bit since I started talking to the eap counselor who suggests that if I want to improve my experience at work I should start meditating and doing mindfulness practices to control anxiety and improve focus. I keep telling them I'm about to do that, and I make plans, and do all sorts of things, but never actually do do it. But in the last two weeks I've done it a few times, today I did it twice, once in the morning and then in the evening. It wasn't real real in that I spent only a few minutes and even then surely I wasn't fully focused. But it's a step. I'm learning not the alphabets yet, maybe to draw the lines, but that's in the right direction towards being able to string words and sentences together.

N gave me the password to her meditation app. I had it for a year or two last year when N (the other one) had it from his work, but I didn't really use it too much. I browsed it a few times, maybe even attempted a regular practice but it never got around to becoming a thing. Because there was no motivation, no reason, and nobody checking if I was doing it or not. Now there are controls. There is accountability. People I don't want to disappoint. This is something I should be doing. For my own good.

My parents meditate, so do my grandparents, and a large part of my family in general. It helps with the 'pressure they say, makes taking life one day at a time easy. And it's not just when you're in desperate need of some sort of help, generally, it's like having a 'life coach' guide you through everyday happenings. It never hurts to do it.

So I'm now going to do it regularly, as regularly as I can possibly do. As regularly as writing even. Five minutes here, ten minutes there. I may not be able to maintain a proper timetable, but as the practice gets frequent, I'm sure it gets easier. After all that's how I got into podcast listening too.