ManicDDaily



Subway Stillness

This morning as I sat on the subway I shut my eyes and focused on my breath.  I listened to the inhalation, then the exhalation; I felt the air creep up and down my nostrils.

I did not read; I did not write in my notebook; I did not check my Blackberry.

I felt my forehead loosen, my brain relax.  It was a bit like a too-tight ponytail gently being untied.  I felt too, or at least imagined, my newly-acquired peace radiating out to the entire train car.  (Miraculously, I did not check to see if this feeling was accurate.)

When I walked from my subway to my office, I kept quiet, still not checking my Blackberry, not talking on my cell, smiling in the cold February sunlight, conscious of the lines of granite against sky, the lines of spindly trees against sky, sky.   When I got to my building, I greeted people with genuine attention, catching the eye of the security guards I know without groaning about Monday, joking with my co-workers.  Later in the day, that same joking mood came back my way again.

I did all this because my eldest daughter has recently returned from her first meditation retreat.  Although I believe, at least on a theoretical level, in the benefits of meditation, I have not actually put these beliefs into practice for some time.

(Relaxation?  A glass of wine in the evening in so much easier.  Self-awareness?  Multi-tasking is so much less painful.)

But my daughter recently returned from her first meditation retreat with face fresh, eyes glowing, and an extended radius of appreciative awareness.  And so I went “hmmm…” (if not “om”), and tried for some stillness.

This is called the ripple effect.  Granted in my case, it was a pretty small ripple, still the water shifted.

We all know about word-of-month, trends, Tulipomania.   The transformation of ripples into waves is faster than ever in our computer age (although frankly some of the virtual waves are a bit on the shallow side.)  Word of mouth used to require one person to talk to another and then another and then another in a combination that was exponential but still essentially sequential; but the internet allows for word of mouth times ten.  Click, click, click, and soon thousands of people may be reached.  (Hopefully, not in one of those chain letters.)

At the same time, one’s voice can feel dwarfed by all the chatter.  And if one’s voice is dwarfed, one’s silence is absolutely crushed.  All that buzz makes what’s beneath the buzz both unheard and unhearable.  You can literally not hear yourself think; or worse, all you can hear is yourself think; and all you can think about amounts to so much twittering, so many pip-tweets.

And in the midst of the clicking, the thinking, the tweeting, one can also forget the power of the personal ripple effect; the wonderful contagion of face-to-face quiet, listening, smiles.