Sit Down To Surf The Slack Water

I first sat down properly 15 years ago.

It’s easy to make life hard, and running your own company is the perfect excuse. I was addicted to work, struggling and straining through late nights and early mornings, always focused, striving, holding on ever tighter, scared what a loosened grip might reveal. Work was my safety net, a veneer of success masking an inner anxiety. Work helped me feel big, secure and safe; it helped me feel like someone.

I first sat down at the Buddhist centre, a dark and cold night Autumn night. Each evening over eight weeks, a momentary pause amidst the storm of everyday life. In the flow of our breathing there is pause: a slack water before the tide of breath turns. In this slack water, time suspends, neither pulling or pushing. This is meditation: finding the pauses hiding in the flow of everyday life, learning to find quiet amidst the noise of your mind.

My mind was noisy with the stuff of my life. Sitting down and being quiet was unnerving. It scared me. Not so much the cushions or Buddhists in blankets, unfamiliar though these were. It was more a powerlessness, a feeling that through this door a stream of new ideas would flood, water pouring into the foundations of a life built on sand.

A compulsion to work was my feast at the smorgasbord of everyday available addictions; where I worked, others shopped, scrolled or consumed. Each an unending search to satisfy the realm of our hungry ghosts. A need to fill up. In sitting down and being quiet, in finding the pause between breaths, these compulsions are revealed. This recognition is important work: seen in contemplation, compulsions can subside.

The World Bank forecasts that the global economy will grow 2.6 times by 2050 and 7 times by 2100. That’s a lot of growth: more and more resources sucked from lands already creaking and reeling under the weight of billions; resources turned into stuff to satiate other hungry ghosts. Simply more and more growth for ever is an impossibility. Yet it’s a story to which we are so closely bound; if we are fish, it is the water we swim in.

To shop, eat, buy, work, consume less, we must see this water clearly; but seeing the everyday requires something radical, a transformative technology or technique. Like learning to sit down and be quiet. Whilst not an end in itself, it is the gap into which the water of change and awareness can flow.

That first sitting down 15 years ago was an ever-so-subtle taste of a new, fresh stream, a flow of new ideas, behaviours and habits, slow moving at first but undeniably reshaping the foundations of my life in service of new effort and activism. It was a doorway to a new and growing awareness.

Seeing the water that surrounds us requires new eyes; and changing tack requires a different story changing tack requires a different story to take hold in our minds. The first streamlet of that new story took hold in me all those years ago, trickling in amidst the storms of life, free to take hold in the pause between the rise and fall, the in and out breath. Sitting down and being quiet: a quite and quiet revolutionary first step.