We wait here and take in a deep breath – all the way in, expanding the stomach and the lungs and the chest, letting the breath push into every last available space before slowly letting it out again – and in the span of this breath we acknowledge the wonder of winter. Almost halfway through the last full month of the sleepy season, mid-February doesn’t always feel like spring is around the corner, but it’s actually not that far off.
On this day, I find solace in my daily meditation, to which I’ve incorporated one of the activities in Mathew Sockolov’s somewhat-cumbersomely-titled ‘Practicing Mindfulness: 75 Essential Meditations to Reduce Stress, Improve Mental Health, and Find Peace in the Everyday‘. Currently I’m on #14: ‘Energizing the Mind’ – no comment from the peanut gallery, or any gallery for that matter. I’ve been doing one per day, so by the time I reach #75 we will be well into April, which should be a very happy place to be.
Even in these socially-isolated times, it’s difficult for some of us to find the quiet in a day. Family obligations and care, work and living-space maintenance, and the mere machinations of an average day make true peace and calm feel like an unattainable state, but it’s not. It simply requires the effort to carve out the space of time for it. Designating ten to fifteen minutes somewhere in a day is not as tough as most of us pretend it is, and it is in this little quarter of an hour in which life can transform.
It didn’t happen on the first day that I meditated – and it didn’t happen on the tenth. I can’t even say it happened on the hundredth day, but on all the days in-between and since, that little sliver of calm grew into a more stable and contented frame of mind that I carried with me throughout the intervening times. That’s the real secret and power of meditation – the way it subtly raises the level and peace and calm that is in all the in-between moments – and those moments form the bulk of our lives.
