#writing
After
From there I embarked on more adventures, some of which might make it into another story, but eventually school came around. I moved for the first time away from my family, friends—my life—to a new area. I’d stopped meditating months before I’d settled into my apartment, my classes, and my new life. I made a small attempt to restart my practice but the chaos of college life snuffed it out before it had a genuine chance to flourish. For better or worse, meditation simply didn’t fit in with my lifestyle at the time. There are certain things in life that demand of you space to exist. And if you can’t offer that, then it doesn’t exist, simple as that. In such situations its better to engage with something wholeheartedly than do it under compromise. But the seed was there. It existed somewhere in the soil, dormant and waiting, expressing itself occasionally in my values or in a moment of quiet observation, waiting to germinate and grow again.
Since writing this, I have begun meditating again, as well as embodying the values of observation and equanimity that come with it. I make no claim that I will keep with it for the rest of my life, or that even now I meditate for the recommended amount of time, which is two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour before bed. On a good day I meditate for maybe thirty minutes split across multiple sessions. Nevertheless I see the benefits. I am aware of how my thoughts relate to my emotions, how a memory or an encounter can shift your mood for better or worse. Through dedicated focus I think I have done a good job in quieting my mind, in pruning my attention of things that are distractive or potentially volatile.
Additionally, I can’t help but use this new mindful and neurological lens to analyze the people around me. The people I live with, work with, hang out with, are likewise “in development”. They’re young individuals similarly exposed to a world they are just starting to understand. They react loudly or emotionally to things I wouldn’t consider worthwhile, and then the next second engage with situations I would consider insurmountable mountains. The people around me are both incredibly flawed, and yet also capable of doing things with relative ease, capable of actualizing things I could only dream of.
And so I find myself playing a game I like to call “Seek and Stand”. Sometimes you are standing. The primordial environment of college life is filled with people who have it half figured out. When someone pursues something that stands in opposition to what you value, it is easy to dismiss. Furthermore, it feels rewarding to maintain principles and values in an environment that so often dismisses them, in the hopes that such principles will pay off in the long run and in the greater context of situations that life offers. And yet sometimes people seem to actualize things you deem valuable, which makes the other part of the game, “Seeking”, appear more optimal. In this stage, you search for values and principles to make your own. Morale strength, or unwaverability in the face of chaos and noise, can seem attractive. It signals coherence, confidence. The trick is in knowing when the adopting of a new value means potentially replacing a better one. The game is played with ever changing perceptions of outcomes, timespans, and the Whorfian-like effects of entertaining certain beliefs. It is not an easy game to play, and yet it is central to this period of my life and of those around me, whether they know they’re playing or not.
Lastly, I want to take a moment to talk about wisdom, because this is a deeply important concept to me, and I think it is where Vipassana and meditation as a whole shines. Wisdom might be best defined as a “learned knowledge”. To elaborate, someone who reads through a philosophy textbook and proceeds to harangue their hapless victim with knowledge of philosophical movements could be said to hold knowledge, but of an intellectual, not intuitive nature. The most well versed individual in the intellectual tents of a life well lived surely doesn’t hold the practical answers to life. Yet by contrast, the advice of a grandparent or teacher might be considered wise as it relates directly to lived experience.
Personally I can say that a prioritization of wisdom over knowledge was a large awakening for me, and a novel concept when it was presented through panna. To me, knowledge was power, and the pursuit and attainment of it was a virtuous goal that I thought would ultimately pay off. It was a safe bet, something you could always put your head down and pursue. I could be happy, I thought, if I just understood the things affecting me. For a lot of my life I tried to solve every problem with knowledge. Any issue, no matter the colour, I would approach with long stretches of thinking, as if my thoughts could erode issues like water carving a path through a sandstone canyon.
The problem with knowledge is that while it is useful, it is at the end of the day a tool, and tools work best for their specific purposes. Knowledge can build nations, train an engineer or a doctor, or describe the process of synaptic plasticity. But it can’t tell you how to answer those real-time, human questions of “How should I feel about this?”, “What should I do?”, or “How should I respond?”. The world of human experience is far too personal, far too nuanced, for any application of knowledge to reasonably apply. Instead, you need wisdom, and wisdom can only come from experience. It is for this reason that I refer to wisdom as a kind of “learned knowledge”, and since this reframing took place in my mind I have placed a special importance on wisdom over strict intellectual knowledge, and I would argue I am the better for it. I don’t know the answer the questions of life. I don’t know what values are important to pursue or retain. But I do know that you can learn from your mistakes, which you are likely to make no matter the course, and that you can give yourself the best chance possible in finding your answers by first allowing yourself to stand on stable ground. What I am advocating isn’t a mindset or a principle, its coherence, and coherence helps no matter the path. And I think an exercise in mindfulness and wisdom is a good first step.