Meditation

For the past several years I have been busy working a full-time day job, editing my latest novel The City, writing magazine articles and shorts stories, managing my website, posting the occasional blog, and starting my own business. This busy schedule could only be maintained by planning every hour of the day, including dinner and exercise breaks, which were often cut short. Like most artists I was leading a double life that was not sustainable in the long term, and it was beginning to take its toll on my mental and physical well-being.

The search for balance in life can be difficult when life heaps upon us numerous obligations simultaneously. In my case, I experienced the abrupt transition of working up to fourteen hours a day (for myself and others) to being laid off from my job within weeks of publishing The City. At first this seemed like a blessing. Suddenly, I had time to devote to a new obligation: the marketing of my novel. But I had to admit I was tired. I hadn’t had a vacation in three years, aside from a couple days off for Thanksgiving and Xmas, during which I had worked. So the first couple of weeks after losing my job, I ended up sleeping a lot. And when I got up, I found that I didn’t have much motivation. Instead of enjoying a well-deserved break, I felt depressed. This depression was the result of having completed my book, a painful process comparable to giving birth, coupled with the loss of my main source of income. I had worked on The City for eight years and was now left with a tremendous vacuum in my life. Though I needed a vacation, I had no desire to take one. I knew I had to take advantage of the opportunity to market my book while still free of the nine-to-five work routine.

As I soon found out, marketing is another a full-time job that artists must perform if they are to be successful. So every morning I sat down at my desk to research, write letters, and make phone calls to various booksellers, publications, industry organizations, and publishers. I sent out copies of my work for review, took book orders, delivered books, wrote invoices, and set up events. This was a slow process given that it was the first time I had taken it on myself. Nevertheless, I made progress, selling books daily (personally, on-line, and in local bookstores) until, on a marketing trip to San Francisco, a reckless driver hit my car. Abruptly, my marketing plans were derailed and, for the next couple months, I convalesced at home between frequent trips to the chiropractor.

I had hit rock bottom. In addition to being emotionally and mentally exhausted, I was physically injured and in pain. Instead of enjoying my achievement and relative success, I couldn’t help but feel that bad luck, such as a car pulling out in front of you on the highway, could instantly destroy all one’s carefully laid plans. In spite of my reduced condition, I couldn’t relax. Nor could I focus. Being a workaholic, I spent my time on various tasks: a little marketing here, a magazine article there, a blog entry, a new website for my consulting business, some job hunting and drafting of proposals; and the days disappeared like peas poured from a bag, without significant monetary return. These activities, in large part administrative, absorbed my time. There were still many books I needed to write, and new areas of creativity I wanted to explore, including cartooning and composing electronic music, but, aware of the tremendous effort and commitment necessary, I was reluctant to begin again so soon. I was still full of ideas, but I lacked the energy to turn them into concrete projects.

When I wasn’t occupied with daily busy work and the maintenance of my existence, I took the time to reflect. I went out less with my friends and spent more time alone. I took long walks on the beach. I went to Big Sur weekly. I read, read, read. About Buddhism, about an old bridge that collapsed in Peru, about a girl with rabies in Colombia who was jailed in a convent, about an epic snowstorm in North Dakota, about rebellion. I did yoga every morning. I meditated.

I felt a need to meditate because I wanted to focus my thoughts and lose the sense of urgency that modern life had imposed on me. Though I have always been a self-aware individual who is skeptical of the status quo, it had become increasing difficult for me to tolerate living in society obsessed with materialism, where money had somehow become culture. In opposition to and protest of this materialist master narrative, I wrote The City, where I presented an alternative vision of American urban life as I and many of my friends and other young Americans had lived it. Like all artists, I was documenting and justifying my existence and worldview through my own experience and perception. It proved to be an epic task, given that I had incubated my ideas and opinions for many years. As it turned out, I had a lot to say about living in what I considered to be a wasteful, greedy, unequal, and unaccountable society. And though my thesis was validated by the recent failure of the financial markets, this provided little solace given that it could have been avoided if people had lived within their means and prioritized quality of life over material excess and ostentation.

The United States is not a thoughtful society. Americans do not take the time to reflect. We do not sit cross-legged on the floor in a room or in nature, close our eyes, breath deeply, and focus our thoughts on the universal or absolute. Most of us do not know how to breathe. Sure we can breath in an instinctive way that is biologically motivated, but we have no control over our breathing, which results in a loss of control of our emotions, thoughts, and actions. For example, when we are stressed we hold our breath and this increases our tension, which leads us to make rash decisions. In our busy lives we are seldom conscious of our breathing. Whole days go by without us considering the life-giving oxygen we consume every moment of our waking lives. The purpose of breathing in meditation is so important because it roots us in the moment and gives us an immediate focus. The breath is the base of the hierarchy of our needs.

There is no right way to meditate. There are schools of Buddhism that have ritualized the activity, but for the secular, modern individual this is unnecessary. Ideally, you want to sit on the ground with your back straight and your hands in your lap, or resting on your knees. You will then look a few feet in front of you or at the wall. You can close your eyes or not. Sitting is important because it reminds you, through the effort of maintaining an upright posture, of your body. As you sit and breathe in and out through your nose, you feel the substance of life slowly entering and leaving your lungs. When you have done this a while, after perhaps some initial anxiety at the thought of having to sit still while a sense of urgency (which is a fiction) still grips you, you will start to feel a sense of well-being permeate both mind and body. While meditating, I experience a sense of expansiveness in which, with my eyes closed, I feel as if I am on an empty plane with nothing around me, though my bed is to the right, the wall to my left, the window in front, and the door behind me. During meditation I realize it doesn’t matter where these objects are located. Beyond that one realizes the objects don’t matter and perhaps don’t even exist beyond the properties we assign them. From this we sense that nothing we worry about matters. And ultimately, that we have nothing. That is freedom. We are alive and breathing. We are calm, silent, and at peace.

During our breathing, thoughts of the outside material world, our lives, and the lives of those we know enter our mind. But we do not cling to them in ways that assert ownership or provoke judgment. We simply observe them with objective calm and let them drift in and out, as one thought connects intuitively to another. If a worry presents itself, we push it away saying, “Now is not the time.” By focusing the mind, we are able to move from the infinite plane of consciousness, via physical sensation, to the rational world of memory, thoughts and ideas.

At this point we may ask ourselves questions. Some consider it a useful exercise to consider our own death: to experience the reaction of our body and mind to this great and ultimate worry of existence. One may also ask the question, “Who am I?” and explore the thoughts and physical sensations that come from this quandary. And subsequently, “What do I want?” In my experience, while these questions allow us to look objectively at our personal shortcomings, and the selfishness and superficiality of many of our desires, they also tend to help us focus on our positive selves and on the wants that are generous and of benefit to others. We may also ask ourselves to focus on someone we dislike, and learn to see the motivations of their actions: to see them as human like ourselves with their own personalities and methods for coping in the world. Thus the meditation connects us with our better selves, reminding us that we and others are basically good and that it is our situational behavior in the material world that at times corrupts our best intentions. When we have meditated in this way for the time we feel is necessary, we are refreshed. Our focused meditation has inspired our creativity and provided new perspectives and solutions to our problems. As little as half an hour of meditation has allowed us to step out of the logistic and mechanical functioning of our daily lives to get in touch with our bodies and our minds.

After several months of following a simple routine of rest, exercise, and meditation, I realized that what I needed to do most was return to Brazil, to the Island of Magic where I lived ten years ago and had last visited six years ago. I wanted to reconnect with my old friends, rediscover familiar haunts, and relive the memories that had inspired me to write my Brazilian novel, Exile. Though the island had grown and changed, it still retained its power to enchant the senses and exalt the imagination. The beautiful natural environment both refreshed my mind and renewed my energy. I was overcome by the same childlike wonder and electric excitement of my first visit many years ago, and reminded of who I was and had forgotten to be in the recent past: A curious, creative, and adventurous person. I realized then, in spite of my conscious resistance, the extent to which my society had influenced my perception. This made me consider how those who have never stepped out of their comfort zone or their culture must be even more tightly bound by false consciousness than myself. In was in this stream of thought that I came upon the idea for my next book project. It was time to share what I had learned about life since I made the choice fifteen years ago to follow my intuition and curiosity as an artist, no matter the consequences.

Inspired in Brazil

Specifically, I plan to write a book about how to live an elegant life: that is, one defined by simplicity, effectiveness, grace, beauty, balance, and strength. I feel I have something to say about the subject, having lived in several different countries and traveled extensively with limited resources writing novels, studying different cultures, meeting interesting people, and learning languages, while earning an advanced degree and working a variety of jobs to pay my own way. Furthermore, I believe the time is ripe for such a book, given that Americans have been living in ostentation, and because of this, are now mired, and have mired the world (by way of a flawed value system), in a deep economic and, by extension, civilizational crisis.

Now that we’ve admitted that capitalism isn’t working, it’s time to develop an alternative approach. In order to do so we must look to the facts, primarily that we are dependent on our environment, and that our resources are finite and need to be properly managed and conserved. Thankfully many, if not most, understand that adjustment and renovation of the existing system will no longer solve our problems. Though compelled by crisis, the upshot is that for the first time in a long while individuals and communities are actively seeking and open to hearing alternative points of view. While The City explored the struggle of a group of housemates to survive and find meaning in modern urban America, my first book-length nonfiction work will provide in-depth analysis, practical advice and creative solutions on how to achieve quality of life, elegantly and with limited means. Clearly, there has never been a better time to sit down and meditate on this goal.