‘Mum.’ The door is pushed gently open, the words are whispered.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you started?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that’s what you look like when you’re meditating.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, okay. See you in ten minutes.’
Closes door softly, then runs down passage yelling, ‘She’s doing it. She’s really meditating.’
It’s just over a week before we leave Adelaide and return to Abu Dhabi. In anticipation of this event, I have been practising mindfulness, awareness, gratitude and have, after a great number of years of thinking, ‘I really must get back to that’ returned to meditation.
Now, according to all of the self help books I’ve read over the last six months (and if there’s one I haven’t read, I’d be surprised), this mindfulness, in the momentness, this too shall pass kind of approach is just the trick for getting through stressful times and situations. And I think at this stage we can agree that living in Abu Dhabi is stressful for me.
I’m not too bad at being in the moment and so on (yes, yes, I know I’m not supposed to be judgmental about it, where I am is where I am and so on), but I’ve got one piece of logic that I just can’t work my way through. The question I keep asking is this: if I can be content at anytime anywhere, then why do I know that I am, overall and on balance and weighing everything up, happier here than I can ever be there.
There’s a long stretch from here til enlightenment. And hopefully enlightenment can be achieved without silence.