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June 21, 2009
And the Living's Easy
My days have taken on an extra frenetic and jam-packed quality lately. I started working full-time, right in time for a slew of deadlines; Rafe graduated last weekend (alas, we did not hop on a plane to New York immediately following commencement), had his sleep apnea surgery this week and came home all jacked up from the hospital Friday. All I can say is thank God for inventing Oxycontin!
He's still very Frankensteiny, but hopefully this surgery will change both of our lives for the better. All this is on top of a million other stressflakes that together have culminated into a giant hairy stressball....deep breathe. Sunday nights are the worst.
Despite my apparent frenzy, I have in earnest been tying to remember to chill out. Sometimes I thrive on this type of busyness (i.e. 8 years in New York); other times, I find it a touch...soul-crushing. For the last few months, however, as a curative measure, I've been reading this fascinating --and, I swear, non-new agey -- book on meditation (pay no mind to its hokey title).
It's about meditation, its practical applications, and both the scientific and Buddhist perspectives on how it actually works. Usually, I'm something of a speed reader, if may toot my own horn, but this book has slowed me down. I've been finding it so completely absorbing, I can only dip in for a chapter at a time as every other sentence literally has me pausing to contemplate for long stretches at a time. Reading this book has been a form of meditation in and of itself.
I keep this book in my monster-purse at all times but I only take it out when I'm on the bus. Like the way some passengers mumble along to their dog-eared copy of the bible or stare transfixed at at their iPhones, this book has become my escape. My particular bus line (the 22) seems to have an unusual concentration of unsavory San Francisco characters yelling and stinking up the ride (the other morning, a particularly fragrant and irritable gentleman squeezed into the seat beside me and
proceeded to glare right me, his eyeballs mere inches from my face, repeating in a satanic grumble, "I'm not going to kill you!" over and and over until I moved to the back). This book takes me to a different, more gentle place.
For the first time in my life, I feel open to understanding the idea behind meditation. I'll take a gander it has something to do with the hippie water I've been ingesting since we moved. Of course, it's no easy task in periods like this to take a step back and truly be present and at peace. For me, it's a matter of having enough alone time and enough free time to do as I please. But those days are, for better or worse, over. At least for the time being. I am recalling those days when I first moved here, and although I was generally anxious about Where Life Was Headed, I lacked the daily grind type stress that I now feel more acutely.
As I sit here in the kitchen writing this, and noticing how the sun is still golden in at 8 o'clock, I'm realizing that today marks the Summer Solstice, the beginning of summer. Not that there is true summer in San Francisco. Still, I'm all for acknowledging it. This time of year represents a time of renewal, purification, and great potential. High time for all of that. Off to take a long stroll with the dog..
Posted by debbie at June 21, 2009 4:00 PM