Decided to meditate today.
Went in my room, shut the door, closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing.
Sitting wasn’t really comfortable, so I cleared off the bedding and laid flat on my back, no pillow, hands rising and falling over my stomach.
Ah yes… my stomach. That tricky little bag of complaints. It wants, it gets, it wants again.
I could complain… but not without giving license to myopia. Its hard for me to eat enough. Eating effects my energy level and mood and stuff, but as far as my body is concerned, “weight gain” might as well be a foreign phrase in a pocket guide book.
No, I’m thinking about my stomach because it’s the only part of me that is moving. It’s drawn my attention, and I’m hungry because I haven’t had lunch yet, but I set the alarm on my blackberry for 4:30pm. Half an hour of meditation during which I don’t have to check the clock because the clock will let me know when to stop.
Up and down. Breathing. Relaxing.
Maybe.
Thinking about appetites. The stomach’s obvious, but there’s more than one bellicose empty space in my body. I’m covered and surrounded by them. There isn’t an inch of me that doesn’t clamor for attention.
- “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” –Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”,p. 40-41 (1971).
My hands, my feet, my mind, my heart — they’re all telling me they have space to fill.
They want to build, to go, to grasp, to know.
There’s a choir of concave hollows, singing, sometimes howling for the convex contentment that had been their earlier blessing.
But it was for the fulfillment of appetite that the pleasures of the Garden were lost. As it was in the days of our fathers, so it is now — even in this age.
Simon spoke of attention as commodity. As I lie on my bed, eyes closed, ears open to all these damned pressing needs (there are none, not needs, not really — but I can hear them nonetheless), I know the economy is in shambles.
Throw a dart at a map of Africa, and you will find the state of affairs in my body. Oh, we’re a republic in name, to be sure — on good terms with the West and its NGO’s and charities and chartered institutions. We wouldn’t get by without the daily influx of foreign aid. But the hospitals are staffed with one doctor per ten thousand residents, infrastructure is a nightmare of intermittent services and milk-skimming dairy hands, and for want of employment, the streets abound with young men with guns. Young men who do not always agree.
My body is a bundle of cravings. Satisfying one means denying another.
“Do you consume so that you may produce? Or do you consume in search of satisfaction?”
Well there’s a thought I’ve never quite heard before — not that succinctly.
I know the answer. Why the inmates run the asylum. Or maybe it’s the old folks who have taken over the nursing home, popping all the pills they want. Sending there hearts into overdrive and tripping on colors and four hour erections.
Jesus and the fig tree — a tree draws nutrients from the soil its rooted in and the sun that shines on it and the water that comes to it, all so it can produce fruit. We’re no different. No fruit on this tree; Jesus curses it. It withers, releasing its components to be reclaimed for productive use.
Why would a tree fail to produce fruit? Couldn’t have been healthy. Like those corrupt third world fiefdoms. Like me. I can feel the pressure in my head — anxiety. Every message I’ve ever internalized, the light and the darkness in conflict. You’re everything; you’re nothing. You’re only worthy of contempt, sometimes not even that: only indifference. You’re loved; it’s a lie. You’ve been given so much; you’ve given so little. You’re a whore and a thief. You’re a saint — pure.
I think about what I want. Not my appetites. This is passion. Desire for wholeness. I ask for it. My body strains after it, physically. It’s not relaxation — it’s yearning.
The mob settles down. The Blue Helmets arrive. Oh, the country’s still a mess, sure. But the urban fighting stops. No more automatic weapons fire at midnight. There’s going to be an audit. Money will go where it was intended.
The blackberry goes off, and I sit up. Centered.
Time to eat.
