Meditation

Do you get nervous like I do? I certainly hope not, but I guess that's life. Old friend plans a birthday dinner for me tonight, invites a few people, then this early afternoon the restaurant calls. It's Restaurant Week here in Washington, DC. Busy. "Can you come in? Someone's leg is hurting... {dissolves into vague mumbling and background noise of forks and glassware and sliding chairs}." Can't cancel on my friend, so I have some guilt to work off. I should have known. My daily horoscope said as much, about plans that'd already been made. Who likes to let down their coworkers?

There was a PBS show about the senior singing group Young@Heart the other night when I came home from work. Really quite something. You see these old folks singing, doing a song like Coldplay's "Fix You," and it brings a bit of perspective over the matters of life. Good to see some people having fun, and music is fun. It's brilliant.

The days you most need to meditate, to a seek a mental space that has no thought, might be the hardest. I think that's why I write. It helps clear the mind. You get something down and you feel less haunted by it, less obsessed with a past failure, with professional inadequacies, personal shortcomings and other stuff that makes you not want to talk to people and enjoy life.

Maybe some people can get away without it. Maybe meditation's usefulness is reserved for people like me. Or, on the other hand, does meditation just sweep problems under the rug? It's a weird kind of chicken or the egg thing, maybe faced by people who think too much without doing anything. Is there a cultural prejudice against 'not thinking/meditation,' one wonders.

The meditation offered by some old guy singing Coldplay along with a chorus of senior citizens struck me as a kindness to troubled minds. Good for him. I hope musicians continue to do their thing in this world, and that the rest of us can listen and stop worrying ourselves sick over things that need to be seen in perspective.

'Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,' Shakespeare put it.