32/40: Arrival
The anticipated feeling of relief as a lengthy inner trek is nearly over. A journey carries its own share of suffering
Home, where my thought’s escaping
Home, where my music’s playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me
© 1966 Words and Music by Paul Simon
Do you remember the last long trip you took?
Perhaps it was a sojourn on an airplane that seemed to last eternity. You were trapped in a tiny space, perhaps either terribly hungry or uncomfortably full. Debating whether to make a sprint for the airless pocket of a washroom with the stomach-turning particular odour it will have, or to tough it out without a washroom visit until after landing. Somewhere a few seats a way a small child is wailing, apparently without taking a breath.
You only wanted to be back home.
Being in a lovely destination somewhere is glorious. But there is a price that the mind tends to shy away from when preparing for such a trip, and that’s the suffering of the journey. Not so much getting there because the mind is filled with the anticipation of what comes next and is enjoying it fully. The trip home feels hard because home is close but painfully far away at the same time.
This too is part of being human. That the longing for something amazing and near in time can be filled with sweetness. On the other hand it can be acutely difficult, perhaps even quasi-unbearable.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are was originally published in 1994, over 30 years ago. It remains a valuable primer on mindfulness and meditation.
It isn’t really divided into chapters, but more into bite-sized morsels of reading on a wide variety of contemplative topics within the context of human life.
One of these is on pitfalls of meditation, which Jon aptly pinpoints as mostly deriving from the obstacle of the thinking mind.
He puts the traps thinking can trigger into two big buckets: thinking meditation is helping you ‘get somewhere’ and thinking meditation has become boring and is ‘going nowhere’.
There is nothing wrong with feelings of boredom or staleness, or of not getting anywhere, just as there is nothing wrong with feeling that you are getting somewhere and in fact, your practice may well be showing signs of becoming deeper and more robust. The pitfall is when you inflate such experiences or thoughts and you start believing in them as special. It’s when you get attached to your experience that the practice arrests, and your development along with it.
Jon’s suggestions to help people get out of these traps include questions like
“Where am I supposed to get?” “Who is supposed to get somewhere?” “Why are some mind states less valid to observe and accept as being present than others?” “Am I inviting mindfulness into each moment, or indulging in mindless repetition of the forms of meditation practice, mistaking the form for the essence of it?” “Am I using meditation as a technique?”
Home is Here
It is a good reminder that I am already home.
I cannot be anywhere but the present moment, which for me right now is a bird heralding the new day in the magnolia tree outside, in this early morning with its beautiful clear blue sky surrounded lovingly by the brilliant colours of the dawn. As I sit here typing these words with my shawl wrapped around me keeping me comfortable in the peacefulness of a space with only me in it, I remember how incredible it is that I have such a beautiful moment to exist in.
I see afresh that I am not struggling to arrive somewhere at all, but I am already here, and will never be anywhere else.
The suffering of feeling like I am on a lengthy, exhausting journey is the dream.
At any time that I am experiencing the sensation of being trapped, it is possible to wake up and know the joyful reality of being home.