You Don’t Need a Response

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We’re a solid month into global lockdown and quarantine. A lot of those ‘maybes’ we discussed last month might be starting to lean one way or the other for you at this point. I’m sure there are things we all miss and things that we have all realized we can do without. As we settle into the new norm, I’ve noticed that like most things, the changes have been more subtle than extreme. There are no roaming gangs of anarchist looters calling for blood in the streets, but the grocery store shopping experience is a tad altered. I haven’t reached some new elevated enlightenment due to the gratuitous amounts of free time that I now have to dedicate to my spiritual practice, but my schedule seems to be a more abstract idea than a way to live my life.

One of the biggest changes I have noticed during this time is the activity level of my inner monologue.

In meditation, we sometimes call this the “monkey mind”. These are the thoughts that you keep thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking whether you want to or not. When I sit for my daily meditation, it usually takes a little bit of time for me to let those thoughts run their course. Sooner or later, and sometimes not at all, they run out of steam and my mind gets a little bit more quiet. The second you notice that your mind is still, you have the thought that your mind is still and you basically lose all that you’ve been striving to achieve. Which is why we view meditation as a goalless practice. The goal, when achieved, is so fleeting that by the time you realize you’ve experienced it, you’re not experiencing it anymore and you’re left with just a memory.

Now even if you don’t have a meditation practice, I’m sure you’re familiar with your inner monologue. It shows up a lot in the shower and the car when you’re winning an argument that nobody is having with you. This is an example of the mind focusing on the future rather than the present moment. It’s a good way to ruin a drive that might be backdropped by a beautiful sunset. So in a way, it’s not different from that monkey mind showing up in meditation at all.

I’ve always had a rather active and negative inner monologue.

If I dig deep and try to decide where it may have come from, I can only assume that it’s from sports. Recently ESPN has been airing a ten-episode documentary on Michael Jordan and the 97-98 Bulls team. Since there are no other sports being played at this time, I’ve been basically glued to my television when it’s on as if it were an actual game. Jordan is one of those rarefied athletes who is the “greatest of all time”. There are few people who have ever been as good at what they do best as Michael Jordan was at playing basketball. So he can get away with quite a lot.

Now, Jordan obviously had some God-given talent, but when you hear his coaches and his teammates and his parents talk about him, you know that it goes much deeper than that. For this guy, losing was not an option. He was there to out work and out play anyone who would ever step on the floor with him. Then when you hear him talk about losing, you really see how deep it goes. He berated his teammates to get as much as he could out of them on the floor. He admits that he wasn’t the nicest guy and that he didn’t care. He was there to win. If you weren’t, you could leave.

Now I’m not Michael Jordan, but I had a touch of that in me way back in the middle and high school days. I look back on it as hating losing more than I ever loved winning. I’d run angry sprints at football practice. I’d pull every trick in the book to get underneath an opposing basketball player’s skin. Every time I stepped on the court or field, I’d approach it with the mindset that I’d never be perfect, but perfect was still all that I would accept. And that’s not very realistic in the real world. We’re not all going to play professional sports, where that mindset will make us the hero of every young kid who ever falls in love with the game.

More likely it can make us insufferable to be around.

I feel like I’ve evolved from angry young high school jock to relatively productive member of society, but I still have a mean streak in me, and it all starts with an inner monologue that is not all that nice to me. My meditation practice has taught me to mostly ignore it. I can let this dark voice say what it wants to me, but that’s not who I am and I really don’t have to react to anything I hear. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always had a problem with the positive energy type people. Internally, I’m not sure I’m a very positive person, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the choices I make and the actions I take. They’re two completely separate things.

One of the ways you silence this inner monologue is by achieving something that I like to call ‘flow state.’ I’ve heard the term used before and maybe I’m misusing what someone may have coined, but for me it’s in line with Taoist thought that there is a certain direction in which the Universe is flowing. If you go with the stream and play your part in this gigantic Universe, you’ll have a much easier time than if you try to fight your True Nature.

So in sticking with the stream metaphor, you’d don’t really have to consider what you’re doing when you’re floating down the stream. You simply let it happen. Jumping back to basketball references, this sometimes happens when a player gets into a groove and it seems like he can’t miss. There’s no surprise here that announcers will sometimes refer to this as the player being ‘unconscious.’ If he actually considered hitting ten shots in a row, he probably wouldn’t hit them. He’s just so in the flow of his game that it happens without any active thinking.

Flow state is something that I strive for in my life. My favorite days are the ones where I just head out into the world and jump from one thing to the next because it feels right, rather than planning it all out. But since this whole quarantine, I’ve struggled to get out of my own way. Every choice that comes up begins an internal debate of how to proceed. I have reasons to go left but just as many to go right. When I think that it will be nice to go outside and get some fresh air on a trail, I’m reminded that we are all supposed to do our part and stay inside so as to flatten the curve. If I sit inside for too long I get antsy and can hear nature calling me back to the canyons and the beach. One second I think that I absolutely have to be productive and get a ton of writing done, and the next I wonder when I’ll ever get another chance to catch up on all five seasons of The Wire. As I mentioned last month, it’s starting to get weird.

The voice in my head has been almost constant.

A day spent sitting in the hammock slugging beers and catching some rays makes me a lazy goalless bum. The days spent locked in my room working on a business plan and attempting to write make me a moody loner. Whatever road I take, I am reminded of the other one. At a time where I’m trying to commit more time to the art of writing, I’ve realized that I’m analyzing everything. It could all potentially get written down. It could all make its way into this article or maybe the next one.

And then I realize something.

I’m not listening.

Sure it’s gotten loud and sure some of the things I’m hearing in my head are unkind or negative or maybe even scary. But I haven’t really taken the time to just listen to what is coming up. I’ve just been trying to spin it into some type of writing or other artistic endeavor and it doesn’t have to be like that. An evening walk underneath city street lights can be just that. Meditating at sunset does not have to elicit the next great awakening of mankind. The voice in my head, loud as he may be, does not always require a response. So maybe I should just let him talk it all out.

That’s just something I’ve been sitting with…

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