taking your meditation on the road

I have an amazing commute right now.  It involves walking through two New York City parks to get to an office that also is full of air-scrubbing plants.  But many times the walk to work is obscured by my "thinkiness," as a friend refers to it.  I have a compulsion toward list making and I pitch hard toward the future. I was born with a hyperactive planning gene. Sometimes I have a headache by the time I even get to the office and I'm figuratively vibrating with solutions to the day's anticipated problems.

So I meditate before I leave and I can tell the difference in my day if I miss a "sit."  When I meditate, I'm a little less anxious and crabby; I laugh much more easily. This week I took the meditation out the door with me.  I hatted and gloved and jacketed consciously.  I walked down the steps and listened to the birds and noticed the protective layer of shoe between my feet and the concrete as I stepped. I dodged — okay, I admit to some pejorative judgment — as texting pedestrians failed to notice the on-coming traffic.  I gently noticed my thinking and brushed it away like a gauze curtain, going back to the breath, quickened a little from the walk. Lists seemed to emerge unbidden from nowhere and I smiled and brushed them off, along with the endlessly-urgent options for how to spend the first hour  at the computer. The not-now bounced toward me relentlessly.

Lest you think I have this walking-while-meditating thing figured out, one fifteen second internal dialogue went something like this:

Breathe, breathe, breathe. In and out. Fill your lungs, let it go.

Oh, Eureka! What a good idea! I will call him as soon as I get to the office. I'll forget this if I don't text it to myself. Oh, also I must, must, must remember to answer Julie's email about that committee.

Chill out, Hopalong.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

Seriously, you know you have middle-aged dementia; you can't even remember a grocery list.  Oh, yes, I can, too.

Breathe, breathe.

I need toilet paper, razor blades and what was that other thing? Damn, it came to me in the shower and I can't believe I forgot already.

Chill out, Hopalong. Breathe, breathe.

Cool how your intercostals expand with the breath, right?

Jeez, look at that guy! He's wearing his pants backward! I wonder if he moved here from Des Moines just because he thought he wear his pants that way and still get lost in the shuffle here. My friends would probably like playing poker with me more if I really learned how to shuffle. I could get a new deck of cards and practice sometime, maybe when I'm on the phone. I could keep the cards on my desk. Oh, there's that homeless woman and I keep meaning to bring her Murray's leftover cigarettes. Is it ethical to give someone cigarettes when you know it's not good for them? It's not like she's going to stop smoking because of me one way or the other. I can't break my own bad habits, so where do I get off judging her for hers?

Chill out, Hopalong.

Why am I so winded when I walk? Eeah, I need to get a check-up.

Chill out, Hopalong, breathe.

Funny how we don't think of sparrows in the same way we do rats. I wonder why that is?

Chill out, Hopalong.

Anyhow, it was worth trying and I'm going to keep at it.