Lambert Antoine Claessens,
After Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn:
Philosopher, Meditating (18th-19th century)

" … evidence that I'm at least still trying to make some difference."

I recently realized that this year, 2024, I have been meditating twice daily for fifty years, with very few instances where I could not maintain this pattern. I have yet to give up on the promise the practice held, and while it promises nothing explicit, the implicit benefits continue to attract my almost undivided attention. Initially, the promoters of the practice promised no end to the benefits. They described it as a backdoor route to everything from perfect health to increased intelligence. Some of the devotees went on to carry their originating metaphor out of all reasonableness, claiming they could break some of the otherwise immutable laws of physics. I never held much interest in violating otherwise immutable laws of physics, so my practice has encompassed much more modest objectives, like no explicit objectives at all.

I firmly believe that it's beneficial for me to engage in something diligently, so fervently that I will not shirk even such a trumped-up obligation as meditation. It might be that the more trumped up the obligation, the more diligently observing it resonates with the universe. Expecting no payback, I cannot feel discouraged if my dedication doesn't innoculate me against any of the usual diseases and traumas of human existence, like being rudely Exiled. My practice renders me no better than I ever was and probably contributed to keeping me humble as if I'd ever held any justification for haughtiness. I sit quietly by myself the first thing every morning. For most of my life, I've gotten up an extra hour early to ensure ample time to perform this simple ablution. It frames the upcoming playing field. By late afternoon, I step aside again to perform my daily bookend. Whatever else I might have been doing, before it can be my suppertime, I set myself down to quietly do nothing for a sometimes excruciating twenty minutes.

You'd think after fifty years of practice, I might have developed the patience of Job, but I haven't. Sometimes, I expend my meditation time riding my wild monkey brain, flitting between the usual secular concerns, feeling almost as spiritual as if I were drowning kittens. Other times, I seem to slip into timelessness for a few minutes. I almost always come back feeling more refreshed. I expect I've inconvenienced everybody I've ever grown close to over those past fifty years, for they've had to wait for me to finish meditating before we could leave to do anything. I must have seemed supremely self-centered sometimes, thoughtless for everyone but myself. Still, I've persisted. I have successfully managed my schedule and almost always received the closure I needed. Now, there's no way to undo whatever damage those time-outs might have produced.

When I sat down to type those simple words, Another Summer, I intended to initiate what might become a parallel meditation to the one I'd then been practicing for over forty years. How would it be if I added on some time to be AWriter in the same spirit I meditated in addition to my accustomed morning meditation? I wouldn't hold myself to knowing beforehand what I might write about each morning or hold myself hostage to any notion that I needed to possess a beginner's mind or any particular sense of direction. My writing might become another kind of meditation, a kind that leaves footprints behind. After fifty years of practice, my meditating has become like throwing a pebble into a quiet pond without the pebble leaving behind any concentric circles highlighting its passage. Meditative writing might produce a few of those circles and, perhaps, some even more permanent side effects.

The most remarkable aspect of my meditation practice might be that if I had wanted to, I couldn't have started that practice this morning, no matter how much I wished to have done it. The practice has produced a very long tail, so every morning seems an inexorable extension. This morning's twenty minutes lengthened by twenty a line already 50 years multiplied by 365 days, multiplied by 20 minutes, multiplied by two. In other words, something like seven hundred thirty thousand and twenty minutes. I probably lack the time to start trying to produce that length of line that way again. If I hadn't started way back when I'd be out of luck today.

I've made good on my initiating intention as AWriter so far. Through seven years, I've missed only a few mornings producing something. I've completed twenty-nine book-length series like this one so far; none have been published, and many have not even been properly compiled. I can reliably produce seven hundred words each morning, but I've not proven to be nearly as reliable with assembling the finished products. Those final assembly and publishing steps might not matter in some ways, perhaps even most ways. I am fortunately not dependent upon my writing to put food on anybody's table. I give away my daily bread, casting it out on whatever waters present themselves. Most weeks, I count nearly two thousand impressions exposed to this AWriter's meditations.

AWriter Writes for perhaps the same reason the dedicated meditator meditates. Such practices serve to animate otherwise merely good intentions. Until the promise gets fulfilled, neither this world nor AWriter really changes. And even if both seem unaffected by either's passing, I contend that the meditating has accomplished something, if only to keep that meditator off the streets for forty minutes each day. Nobody knows how to account for what's never happened, and no volume of anticipation ever equals the actual effects unseen practices have had. I became AWriter in the same way I became a meditator, merely by promising myself something and then making good on that promise. This story is evidence that I'm at least still trying to make that difference. Through all my many Exiles, though, I've maintained my meditation practice, always maintaining addressability to that tiny focal point. During this latest Exile, I began my journey home when I innocently began my meditative writing practice. I didn't understand then, as I do now, that I started coming home the moment I wrote those apocryphal words: Another Summer.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz