“Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness
It’s important for you to know that I began this post with an entirely different quote and in an entirely different way, with a metaphor about dish-washing and a sort of flimsy discussion about revision. I deleted it.
Then I started over and wrote about epithalamions. How I don’t like being asked to write them, and something about writing under pressure. Also flimsy. Deleted.
The problem with writing and deleting is that the ghosts of your rejected ideas linger, and the more you erase, the more ghosts you have to contend with, making the blank screen twice its size and twice as loud.
Maria Gillan’s crow came bounding down the salted sidewalk outside my perch in Starbucks. It yammered about my difficulty in writing an essay on mindfulness: Maybe it’s because you’re not mindful. Maybe it’s because you’re not actually good at meditation. You’re kind of a jerk. You told someone to fuck off the other day in traffic. Remember? And I did remember. And I felt bad.
Then my essay happened.
A guy about my age wearing a suit and tie sat down across the table from me. “Ah,” he said. “You read Thay Nhat Hanh, do you?” Thay (pronounced tie) means “teacher” and Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced tick not hon) goes by Thay with his students.
“Yeah,” I said without looking up. I have two hours until the daycare closes and my daughter will need to be whisked home to her bath and dinner, and holy shit I need to fold that laundry in the basement because I am seriously out of towels, and my internet browser is open behind Microsoft Word and the emails are trickling in with questions about spring workshops…
“Yeah, my college roommate got me into some of his stuff a long time ago. Haven’t read him since. I might still have his book but I’m not sure.”
“Hm.” My Americano is not strong enough.
“Are you meditating?” he asked.
“I’m writing about meditation.” Totally true. I was not meditating. I wasn’t feeling compassionate or mindful or serene at all. I was smiling at the irony of wanting to write about mindfulness while wishing I could calmly hit this guy on the nose. I was annoyed that he was talking to me, and I was even more annoyed at myself for being annoyed. That’s not very mindful.
“Oh, like for your classes?” The tenor of his voice climbed higher here, like he was asking a child where her mother was.
“No, like for a job.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
He introduced himself and we shook hands, but I gradually stopped answering his questions. I began writing those first two beginnings, writing and deleting. Stupid essay, stupid ghosts, stupid guy with his stupid attitude. I yanked my headphones from my ears and closed my laptop, swept it all into my bag and told the chatty man to have a good day. He looked up at me, smiled, and said, “You do the same!”
His eyes were actually quite pretty, a goldish blue. What struck me, however, was the way he responded: with enthusiasm, as if I had offered him equal sincerity and not the half-assed, pissed off haveagoodone I actually delivered. I got in my car and knew what to write, drove to my office and started.
What’s strange is that I don’t think I would’ve said anything differently in that scene at the coffeeshop. The guy was clearly not picking up on my social cues that said please let me focus, and he seemed to think it was cute that I was a writer. I didn’t tell him to fuck off. I was polite. I would have used the same language had he been an elderly woman, a child, a teenager. But behind my words, I was burning. And mindfulness, if anything, is more than a physical display.
I am meditating now. I am focusing my concentration on that interaction and the way it made me feel, and I’m noticing how it relates to the practice of poetry. That man stepping in on my writing time pissed me off; it made me jealous of his audacity – acting as if his time was more valuable than mine. It made me angry when he raised his voice as if talking to a child. It embarrassed me when he smiled happily and said goodbye, probably oblivious to any wrong he’d done, probably smiling just to smile at me.
When I left the coffeeshop, my cheeks were red in the rearview mirror. My stomach was tense. I was breathing slowly but the air only dipped down my neck before my lungs shoved it back outside and grabbed for more. The tiny star of a headache bloomed behind my left eye. I sat down in my office with a mental inventory of all the tense muscles and nerves in my body.
The chatty man may as well have been a manifestation of my writing process, which is probably more similar to yours than it is different – we are all the same in so many ways. Our process doesn’t pick up on social cues but wants to give us something, shows up when you’d like to avoid it but sleeps in when it’s needed, and, of course, it wears a suit.
The only major difference between that man and my writing process is that I abuse my process flagrantly, out loud, in writing and in my thoughts. I’ve earned a good deal of positive attention and awards in my career, though I admit I am typing this now so I can read it tomorrow when I feel, again, like a directionless, fussy, judgmental buffoon. The feeling will come. And it will go.
I recently came really, really close to publishing a research paper in a top tier journal. After working with the editors on some promising revisions, they decided to pass, and just by a hair. They gave me pages of positive feedback, but told me that the piece just didn’t work for them yet.
Having a year’s worth of research writing rejected left me seriously wounded. The rejection wasn’t gradual; it was sudden, in a letter that wasn’t there and then it was, in my hands, and I wasn’t quick enough to be mindful. I lashed out at myself for two months straight until I found myself at the kitchen table one night, writing the same poem (about an Iraqi housedress I have hanging in my closet) over and over and over, deleting everything I wrote, writing and deleting, writing and deleting, the ghosts stacking up like folded sheets. The poem wasn’t uncooperative. My process was doing its job. But the more I berated myself, the more I tacked on the extra weight of annoyance at myself for not showing more compassion.
Even though I’ve been meditating for years, I regularly lurch so far away from mindfulness that I am only capable of self-abuse. It does not stop until I refocus on my breath, send concentration and kindness to my body, and embrace that godawful sting of perceived failure. Get away from abusive thoughts by dropping my awareness into my center. (I have a yoga book for kids that I still read called Sitting Still Like a Frog. I wish I’d had it when I was small. In it, Eline Snel tells us that, when our thoughts are out of control, it is logical to focus instead on our abdomens, the rise and fall of it as we breathe. It makes sense. There are no thoughts in the abdomen.)
I regularly reestablish those boundaries I unknowingly placed around my work when I was a fearless beginner, when I was writing to write. Because my intentions were healthy, so was my practice. In order to write again with courage, I regularly withdraw from wanting so much from the process and all its promises.
In Living Your Yoga, Judith Laseter suggests the meditative exercise of asking “And then what would happen?” after listing all your worst case scenarios in any given situation. Say you don’t publish that paper, that poem, that book. And then what would happen?
Well, your work will have to be sent somewhere else, which will take more time, maybe months or even years including revisions and wait time. And then what would happen?
Actually, you might have more time to improve the work. But it wouldn’t be convenient, because you really want to see it published now. And then what would happen?
You might have to tell people you were rejected. They might feel bad for you or disappointed. They might talk about you with other people. And then what would happen?
I guess you’d get over it.
The quote at the beginning of this essay reminds me that meditation is not evasion but rather the most direct, serene, confident approach to life’s difficulties, including poetry. Is poetry a difficulty? (Are any of you saying no? Liars.) By centering yourself in the midst of so much demanding negativity, you are confronting it with peace. Evasion is a symptom of fear, practiced by ignorance. What if you preferred mindfulness over the concept of success? Well, people might think you’re tackling humanity’s problems all wrong.
And then what would happen?
wonderful essay-thoughtful,perceptive.
Posted by: maria gillan | January 17, 2015 at 01:29 PM