Practices

I think of meditation as a practice, a thing I do regularly because the doing it teaches me over and over how to be happy and peaceful and full of life. I have a lot of practices, and they are all routines that teach me how to be good at the things that make a fulfilling life, that teach me how to love the things that make a fulfilling life, and that teach me how to see that the things that make a fulfilling life are already present very often.

I got up this morning, made coffee, and sat in my reading chair to drink it. I spend several hours almost every morning all alone, reading and writing and thinking about a variety of things. This morning I got more information about how to cook healthy foods, thought about the value of lectures in the humanities, read a personal account of the connection between Tourette's and OCD, wrote about community and the connection between Buddhist Sanghas and intellectual community, and considered the effect The Crucible had on me (by self-reflection and writing and by learning a bit more about McCartheyism). Every day is different, but this undirected reading and thinking, this time for letting new ideas in is a practice aimed at delight, at data collection, and at constant integration.

This morning after my coffee, I ate a bowl of leftover roasted chicken covered in homemade chimichurri sauce. The routine of preparing chicken for one meal, using the bones to make broth, using the leftovers for some other meal, the routine of chopping and mixing and pouring, the smelling of each herb in the sauce, the movement of my hands, the sound of the food processor--each of these routines is a practice designed to make me better at making healthy food choices, make me a better planner, a better user of all parts of my food, more in tune with my body. And the tastes and smells and textures of the food and my practice of noticing those beauties while I shop, prepare, and eat, teach me to love the things that I know make me healthy and energetic. The conditions of happiness are already present for me when there is chimichurri sauce for breakfast; the world is already stocked with delightful things.

I sometimes tell people that I would like to be a monk, if only I were religious, and I kind of mean it. I am passionate about my practices, about seeing my day unfold with every hour devoted to some kind of ritual of love and learning. I like having my hours for study, my hours for work, my hours for eating, my hours for exercise, my hours for staring at the ceiling, my hours for loving Livy and Aaron and my friends. If to be a monk is to choose an all-consuming purpose and then to devote every hour for the rest of your life to that purpose, to cultivate yourself consciously to be the person who can embody that purpose, to teach yourself to love and to embrace willingly the things that you know are good, then I am a monk already. My chosen purpose is still unfolding, as I imagine a monk's purpose unfolds through the decades of his life, but I choose moving in the direction of better and better mental maps and of the joy of making them.