Recovery Girl: Meditate

From time to time over the years, I've tried to meditate. My reaction wasn't much different from my mother's upon trying yoga, "It's awful. You do nothing. I don't like it." Motion is our medium. To sit quietly -- we don't, unless it's late at night and we're very tired or we have an apple or a book or the phone in our hand.

I, however, have made progress in this department in recent days. I can't say I enjoy meditating; but I do it: five minutes every morning. I first began to feel its effects during a bout of acid reflux (indigestion). Anxious about the reflux, which was inhibiting my sleep and was probably due to anxiety and/or age in the first place, I began (as anxious people do) to grow extremely anxious about being anxious. Not for the first time, I had a real incentive not to be anxious. But how? Since I already exercised regularly, meditation seemed like the next cost- and side effects-free solution.

I'd tried meditation in the past, but this time, I felt my body -- and then, soon afterward my mind -- slow in a way that felt undeniably pleasant. I could hear the steady thump thump of my heart. The sound of it, the very insistence of it, moved me in a way I hadn't felt moved by my physical being since I'd  felt my my own babies knock around inside me.

Well it's not such a big deal to sit still for five minutes. But then something else happened. The goal of meditation, of course, is not to think but to focus: a paradox -- to me and the rest of the uninitiated. Every time your mind starts to do what it's not supposed to do, i.e., think (about breakfast, plans for the day, the latest storm center of life) -- the gurus tell you to simply turn your attention back to home base (your breath). Should your mind wander back to the storm center, simply observe yourself doing that and return to home base.

So here's how I got hooked: one day, while agonizing over something and starting to feel my stomach cannibalize, I remembered from meditation the trick of cutting off my thoughts, of simply picking them up as you would an errant child, and depositing them back in the more neutral zone of my breath. In a way that I can only describe as miraculous, I was instantly transformed from an angry person to a person observing an angry person. And more effectively than any medication or therapist, I managed to cut the cord between me and my highly flammable emotions. In other words, I could detach. Thump thump. I felt the beat of my precious heart.

Habits I Picked up From My Father

Two people now have mentioned the book "Shit My Dad Says."  Mistakenly remembering the title as "Habits I Picked Up From My Father," I thought about habits I picked up from my father, among them:

a.) a tendency to scribble notes to myself on scraps torn from other bits of paper. Do I do this for economy's sake? That was his motivation. I do it, I think, simply because he did it.

b.) settling down into a chair with a pile of reading matter. I was about to settle into a favorite seat the other night with my own unwieldy pile when it occurred to me that I was doing exactly what he had always done. And when I made that association, I was flooded with warmth and love. Why? I suppose because I felt connected to him. Funny -- because my father isn't dead. I can call him or drive the hour it takes to see him any time. And yet, seeing a quality of his in me made me feel closer to him than when I do actually call or visit him. Which reminds me of something he often said: Both the memory and anticipation of the event are often better than the event itself.

Updike on Chinese Food

What a thrill to have come upon Rabbit Redux, which I read first, followed by Rabbit Run. John Updike, who died today at age 76 of lung cancer, came to speak at a writing class I took with Anne Bernays in around 1977. He must have just been married to Martha then; she looked adoringly at him the whole time.

No novel that I've read includes a better description of Chinese food than Rabbit, Run (and remember the book was published in 1960, pre-Szechuan, during the high-Cantonese period):

"The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chest-nuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty. "

And then, later, watching Ruth, in contrast to the repellant Margaret:

"No I don't know," she says. "I don't think so." She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver."

Share your favorite Updike-isms (?) Updikelettes (?).

Donald Antrim's Another Manhattan

Reading Like A Writer
The Donald Antrim short story, Another Manhattan, which appeared in the New Yorker's winter fiction issue (December 22 and 29, 2008) was the most depressing story I've read in a long while. Then why did I feel so much better after reading it? What made the story so humane, so beautiful, so uplifting? Feel free to answer because I think this is why those of us who love literature love it. It's like coming out over and over again as a human being.