Sunday In Your Mind

If you think of every stimulus you experience on a day to day basis as a 'request' of your mind, from the first time you look at your phone in the morning to, say, the sound of a car door closing outside your window before you fall asleep, the modern mind certainly gets a lot of requests every day. No wonder meditation is such a hot trend right now.

Our capacity for distraction is seemingly limitless, and apps like Instagram gamify our user experience to keep us entertained, engaged, and you could say aroused. But we have enough self-awareness to realize all the mindless staring, scrolling and tapping might not be making us feel so good, hence, I think, this big migration toward meditation (the political climate in the U.S. also probably has something to do with it).

I've only been meditating regularly (which is to say, every morning) for a month, having dabbled for a couple of years before that as part of my program of sobriety. But committing to it every day has had a huge impact so far. I can't say exactly how it's working, but the simplest explanation is that every day in my brain feels like Sunday.

You know how on Sunday, traditionally everything is slower, you wake up later, less seems to be required of you, the mailman doesn't come, and you might deviate from your routine wildly and not feel bad about it? That's sort of what meditating every day feels like.

I find myself thinking less, reacting less, worrying less, smiling more, laughing more, and having more conversations throughout the day. I'm less impatient to get to the next thing. It feels like my blood pressure has decreased to an almost unconscious level. I'm a cat on catnip. When I have an impulse to go down some destructive or negative rabbit hole in my mind, I catch myself: Today is Sunday, my subconscious seems to be saying to me. The rabbit holes are closed on Sunday.

Meditation might not be the only reason for the changes above. Around the same time in January, I also deleted Facebook and Instagram from my phone and changed my passwords to a randomly generated jumble of characters that I didn't bother to write down (the impulse to check them was that strong). Not having them in my life has significantly brought down the number of 'requests' on my mind, and with it, I find that the daily experience of living in my head has become vastly more proactive than reactive. 

With an addiction to social media, entertainment, infotainment and the like, it sort of feels like our brains are just going, Show me something new! Show me something new! Show me something new! all day long. We like new things. They make life less boring. They make us feel new. Every time we look at Instagram we're seeing something new (and increasingly being encouraged to purchase something new, in between memes and pictures of friends' brunch spreads). Avoid this stimulation and you're simply giving your brain space. Meditation also gives it space, to learn how to observe thoughts without becoming consumed by them. And with both those things together, a familiar phenomenon starts to happen, one we so often forget about, and one which we more closely associate with childhood: imagination, make-believe, play, spontaneity, creativity. As a creative person, I need that daily habit in order to thrive and succeed at my creative purpose. Being proactive, as opposed to reactive, is the harder thing to do. But with meditation and some serious impulse control, it's becoming much easier than it was.

Want to get started with meditation? Some free options are YouTube (type in something like 'singing bowls' or 'guided meditation' and you're off and away), the app Insight Timer, or try a two-week trial with either of the incredible companies MNDFL or Headspace.

Progress

When I think about trying not to buy so much, I find myself having to think more about the reasons why we buy things in the first place. There are so many. Sometimes, we create a need (or an advertisement creates it for us). Sometimes we want to see ourselves differently, play a role that takes us out of the doldrums of being ourselves. Sometimes we want a reward, a jolt of dopamine. And sometimes I think we just want to see progress in our lives. 

Whether it's an item of clothing, a house, or a car, stuff is a conspicuous suggestion of progress, but it isn't progress itself. It's possible we buy things to represent a milestone for something that's happened to us in the same way that we share our lives on social media. We want external validation for the things we do. If you can't see it, and if others can't see it, is it real? If we didn't document it in an Instagram photo, did it happen?

I walked past the coffee shop next to my building the other night, thinking how well I knew that space, its smells, its menu, its regulars, the unchanging quality and taste of its espresso. I thought, if I moved apartments, an idea I entertain every now and then, as most of us do, I would also be moving coffee shops, upending an entire tradition that I've kept up for four years.

If I moved, what would I really be doing? I'd be telling myself that I had somehow evolved, progressed, and was ready for something bigger, better, nicer. The coffee shop in that theoretical upgraded world would surely have better music, better food, better coffee, I found myself saying. But wait, what is 'better'? When I move, where exactly am I going?

The visible things we sometimes call progress are containers for our lives. You have to put something in those containers, otherwise you just keep wanting to buy more containers. When you put a purpose, or something like it, in those containers, you suddenly start caring less about everyone else's progress, and about the superficial indicators of your own. What is the progress that can't be measured, or which exists on some sticky note, or in a notebook that no one sees? And why does the invisibility, the silence, of that progress make you so uncomfortable?

Image by Claire Z