An Experiment in Scotch

The line between being a med­i­ta­tor and a medi­a­tor is a fine one. I am not a medi­a­tor other than in dis­putes of which cat threw up on the couch and and inter­nal dis­cus­sions con­cern­ing my jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for switch­ing from cof­fee to tea. See, this is why I’m a bad med­i­ta­tor, already this post is off the rails when all I wanted to do was sit down and focus on a sin­gle thing. Which is never true.

I’ve taken up med­i­tat­ing again as a defense mech­a­nism to the anx­i­ety dri­ven day­mares I have upon wak­ing up each morn­ing, day­mares in which I’m not par­tic­u­larly good at any­thing. So, what I choose to do is par­take in an activ­ity that I’m, and I’m being com­pletely frank here, ter­ri­ble at. I’m treat­ing per­for­mance anx­i­ety with an activ­ity that increases per­for­mance anx­i­ety. Per­fect. And when I call myself a med­i­ta­tor, I mean that in the same sense that some­one might call me a piano player or French speaker or lit­ter box cleaner, i.e it’s not some­thing I do on a reg­u­lar basis, reg­u­lar enough to even be com­pe­tent at it.

Still, I have this odd con­vic­tion that if I could only focus on my breath for a ten count up and then back down, twenty in all, my con­cen­tra­tion abil­i­ties would be through the roof and thus, I could stop con­cen­trat­ing on fail­ure and con­cen­trate instead on cre­at­ing the next great Amer­i­can novel or even a clean lit­ter box. For the past 10 morn­ings (includ­ing week­ends, a sign of my tem­po­rary com­mit­ment), I’ve got­ten up and med­i­tated for twenty min­utes in an attempt to calm the exis­ten­tial hum that has taken over the radio sig­nals of my brain. Kurt Von­negut coined the phrase “exis­ten­tial hum” as his descrip­tion for the con­stant buzz that exists in our brains all the time, the demands and wor­ries of our daily lives rat­tling the anx­i­ety noise­mak­ers at full blast. Or maybe it’s just Von­negut and I that have that prob­lem. Regard­less, he said the only time he was able to actu­ally extin­guish the hum was when he was doing heroin. Not know­ing any heroin deal­ers, I chose a slightly dif­fer­ent path in try­ing to learn how to med­i­tate the hum away.

Aware­ness med­i­ta­tion involves focus­ing on the breath for a period of time, in my case I chose twenty min­utes, which is turn­ing into a rather lofty goal The book I’m read­ing on med­i­ta­tion describes a process where you say in-1 on the in breath and out on the out-1 breath, repeat­ing for all num­bers up to ten and then count­ing back down again. This seems like a fairly sim­ple propo­si­tion in its descrip­tion but when each day increases the level of anx­i­ety you’re deal­ing with (for rea­sons that may or may not become clear as this essay con­tin­ues, it all depends on whether I can stay focused that long) and you gave up drink­ing for the first quar­ter of 2012, sud­denly it’s extremely hard to ignore all that and just think “I’m going to count my breaths for twenty minutes.”

Let’s face it, in our daily world, the moments of quiet and con­cen­tra­tion are almost non-existent which is one thing I’m enjoy­ing about the Inter­net black­out today in protest of SOPA. I have decided I will just take the day off from Face­book and Twit­ter and pos­si­bly email if I can man­age it though frankly, none of this will change my non-existent abil­ity to med­i­tate tomor­row morn­ing for twenty min­utes. Dur­ing my times of sit­ting on the floor in the morn­ings, I have found that my mind can wan­der to the strangest of things as well as the most mun­dane, all appar­ently in a dia­bol­i­cal effort to keep me from my stated goal of focus and con­cen­tra­tion. I think about the heater com­ing on or the afore­men­tioned lit­ter box that hasn’t been cleaned or the fact that the dog farted (a recur­rent theme lately in my writ­ing, not sure he’s get­ting any­more rawhide bones) to what­ever else means I don’t have to sit there and think in-1, out-1, in-2, out-2.

Last Fri­day, I attended a stag­ing of La Bête, a play inspired by the French play­wright Molière. The cen­tral theme of La Bête pits two char­ac­ters against one another. The first is Elomire, a man staked like a dog in the mid­dle of the yard to a set of prin­ci­ples he holds dear. I like to think of this type of char­ac­ter as The Mar­tyr. His prin­ci­ples are his rai­son d’être, fun­da­men­tal not only to his vision of the world but to his inter­ac­tions with his friends and patron. He is a man blind to con­se­quences. The sec­ond is Valere. He is the pro­to­typ­i­cal stage Fool, an arche­type of the the­ater and in the case of La Bête, the foil to Elomire’s idea of prin­ci­ples and The Right. Valere is inter­ested in pleas­ing peo­ple and hav­ing a good time, ideas obvi­ously anath­ema to the purity of Elomire.

The entire play is an exam­i­na­tion of the con­flict between these two arche­types, the Mar­tyr and the Fool. This con­flict is promi­nent through a great deal of the world’s lit­er­a­ture. The stoic Mar­tyr, ever attached to the Prin­ci­ple, marches on towards, alter­na­tively, world peace, cathar­sis or doom. The Fool goes about his busi­ness enter­tain­ing peo­ple by appeal­ing to their ani­mal desires, ignor­ing his place in the great drama (even in a com­edy!). It is the epit­ome of High Brow ver­sus Low Brow and involves all the tsk-tsking and “frown­ing down the nose” of the elites and their Prin­ci­ples. Tellingly, the Mar­tyr is never a happy, ful­filled char­ac­ter other than in his own tor­tured psy­che. How could he be? He con­sis­tently and per­sis­tently sac­ri­fices that which makes us human at the altar of his beliefs. The Mar­tyr is invari­ably found unlike­able at the end of this par­tic­u­lar play as he has spent the entire time going around say­ing “you SHOULD” and “you NEED” and “it’s the Prin­ci­ple of the mat­ter”. In the play (and in my expe­ri­ence), peo­ple who plead their case by implor­ing oth­ers based on guilt end up tak­ing the long walk upstage alone because, well, those peo­ple aren’t much fun to drink beer with (they prob­a­bly think drink­ing beer is a waste of ones intellect).

The Fool has his prob­lems too. The world would be a sad place if it was ruled by Fools (leav­ing aside the fact that West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion IS appar­ently ruled by Fools at this junc­ture in his­tory). It’s the Mar­tyrs that drive change in their annoy­ingly insuf­fer­able ways. To live a Fool’s life is to live a life with­out much mean­ing. The Fool goes off on his merry way, totally unaware of his lack of depth, liv­ing a life com­pletely unex­am­ined. For many of us, we strug­gle between the two roles, on one hand hop­ing to truly change some­thing in the world, on the other, just get­ting by because let’s face it, chang­ing the world isn’t only hard, it’s largely thank­less and God knows your son just wants you to come home and throw the foot­ball to him after work.

Of late, I have taken this dra­mat­i­cal con­flict and applied it to my men­tal behav­ior where on one side (undoubt­edly the left one), I feel the need for con­stant improve­ment and progress, to learn new things, to see new worlds, to be able to sit on the damn floor for 20 min­utes and just focus on my breath. On the other side (or more likely, in the amyg­dala, that cen­ter for all things emo­tional and animal-like), I want to sit on the couch with a dou­ble rum and coke watch­ing reruns of Two and A Half Men until I black out. So I’ve taken to med­i­tat­ing in an attempt to medi­ate the con­flict between the two. It’s just not going so well.

If you’ve never tried to med­i­tate (or pray for an extended period of time if you pre­fer things more reli­gious in nature), it’s shock­ingly dif­fi­cult. Not dead­lift 300 pounds dif­fi­cult but still, excep­tion­ally hard. The mind, if left to its own devices, prefers to just flit along on the men­tal scenic byway stop­ping for a scenic over­look here or an inter­est­ing diner there, until it’s time to go to bed again and noth­ing has been accom­plished. To focus on a sin­gle thing for even 5 min­utes is excru­ci­at­ing. Or maybe that’s just my Twit­ter addic­tion talk­ing. I’ll count up to about three and then dis­cover that I’m think­ing about an unfin­ished essay. Then I’ll vow men­tally to redou­ble my efforts, start over and then only make it to two the next time. Clearly, things are not improving.

With­out get­ting into the actual detail since there’s no sense in pro­vid­ing detail of an event that may or may not hap­pen, the anx­i­ety I’m attempt­ing to deal with through med­i­ta­tion instead of alco­hol regards my appli­ca­tion to become part of some­thing life chang­ing in the same way the lot­tery might be life chang­ing but in a much more intel­lec­tu­ally ful­fill­ing way. And with the same approx­i­mate odds of suc­cess. So log­i­cally, my left-side, Mar­tyr char­ac­ter brain says that there is no point in obsess­ing about it, let’s try to improve things by becom­ing aware of the fact we’re breath­ing. Of course, the amyg­dala, ever present since there is no telling when you’ll need to fight or run like hell, keeps telling me to focus entirely on the event that may or may not hap­pen and thus, degrades my abil­ity to con­cen­trate even more than the already piti­ful level.

On the plus side, this morn­ing dur­ing my not par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­ful breath aware­ness med­i­ta­tion ses­sion, I did man­age to work out a thorny issue I was hav­ing with an entirely dif­fer­ent 2000 word essay. Unfor­tu­nately, the solu­tion involves delet­ing it com­pletely and start­ing over. Still, minor plus sides that involve delet­ing 3 hours and 2500 words of work aside, thus far, the med­i­ta­tion treat­ment plan doesn’t seem to be par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­ful. Mal­colm Glad­well thinks that it might take 10,000 hours to become truly pro­fi­cient at some­thing. If that’s true, I’ll be pro­fi­cient some­where around March 10th, 2094. No won­der peo­ple take Paxil.

Of course, long before I turn 121, this anx­i­ety invok­ing event will be decided one way or the other and life can go on. Anx­i­ety seems to be a func­tion of inde­ci­sion. When you come to a fork in the road, anx­i­ety takes over until you make up your damn mind which direc­tion you’re going to go. If you aren’t at all in charge of mak­ing the deci­sion, the anx­i­ety wors­ens. This is why Robert Frost was such a good poet, he just always took the road less trav­eled and didn’t worry much about it. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the posi­tion where the course of my life lies in some­one else’s hands. Not since I applied to col­lege have I felt com­pletely pow­er­less regard­ing my future and even then, I didn’t par­tic­u­larly care that much about what col­lege I went to since all I really wanted to do was keep play­ing soccer.

In the end, I will prob­a­bly con­tinue to med­i­tate for twenty min­utes each morn­ing until I don’t. They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit. If that’s the case, I’ll be a full fledged novice med­i­ta­tor on Feb­ru­ary 1st and can surely look for­ward to a break­through on that day when I man­age to count to five breaths with­out think­ing about my legs falling asleep.