After trying out various guided mediations over the past few months, I now realize that much of meditation is about letting the mind loose only to pull it back in the moment we are aware of its being lost.
For the most part, it is trying to focus on one thing — usually the breath, then the mind wanders, so you bring your mind back in to start again. No matter how hard I try to stay focused, the mind never fails to travel to its own delight.
It’s a cycle. Lost, wandering, found. Back to the center. Back to the breath. Start again.
I’d like to think that life and how we think, feel, and experience the world work the same way.
“Lost” is what most of the people in my generation consider themselves to be. Lost is what we feel when we’re unsure. It’s what we feel when we don’t belong somewhere. We are decentered, out of focus, out of breath.
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.”
But why are we in such a hurry to be found?
If even in a contained and focused exercise such as meditation, we are expected to get lost amongst our thoughts, why the more stringent standard for the rest of our waking lives? Where we’re supposed to be at this point of our lives is never obvious, as it should be, just as noticing the breath is hardly ever done consciously.
The breath, in this case, is where we are now. It is our current center and the speed at which we are moving away from our present location. It is our routine, our habits, our everyday reliefs and dreads. It is the shape of our reality.
To know the breath and to know when we stray away from it, that’s how we find ourselves. We wander, but we take our mind back in focus and start again.
Take a deep breath. We’re not lost, we’re just moving around a lot.
And I’d rather that than no movement at all.