Life as a Meditation

There is no rush. Life is a meditation.

This afternoon, after waving goodbye to my third-grade class, I wrote these lines on my lesson plan.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to live life truly and how, even I, have been contemplating my next move: What will I publish next? Where will my next gem come from? I’ve been in such a rush that I haven’t stopped to smell the roses.

Today, I realized how being so focused on the next moment has stopped me from sitting with the magnitude of what I’ve done in the last three months alone. I’ve published my first chapbook and my first full-length poetry collection. Why, then, can’t I sit with this accomplishment and celebrate all that I have accomplished in such a short amount of time?

What pushes me to push forward — to contemplate, to strike away at a new meditation before it is the right time to do so?

I believe there’s a number of reasons (societal and otherwise for this), but I’ll refrain from that long interlude and remain present, here and now with you.

When I graduated from college and completed my undergraduate thesis, a dear friend spoke to me about how we couldn’t just sit with our achievements and marvel in them all; we had to constantly be onto “the next big thing” as we moved forward in our educations. Suffice it to say, I fell guilty to this same phenomenon because I couldn’t just sit with my words in the silence.

I think all the world’s problems would be solved if we just sat with our silence.

So, I think I shall sit in silence for a little while until the muse strikes me once again.