Keep Moving

When I was a little girl learning how to cross busy streets with the help of WALK and DON'T WALK signs, I had no problem with the idea of waiting for the WALK sign before proceeding across the street, but if the sign switched to DON'T WALK before I made it to the other side, my impulse was to run back to where I'd started, wait for another turn, and walk faster the next time. In my mind, getting the DON'T WALK sign while I was still walking meant I hadn't done it correctly and needed to start over.

It took some time for me to recognize that, in most cases, all I had to do was keep going. Occasionally, I also needed to speed up or make some other adjustment, but rarely was going all the way back to my starting place a good idea.

As an adult, I still struggle with the reality that when mid-course corrections are needed it's usually more efficient to make those adjustments while I am in motion than to stop dead still and then try to take off again. Imagine what would happen if a pilot had to search for a landing strip every time strong winds started to blow the plane off course.

Sometimes it matters less what you do than it does that you DO something. I admit this is a hard lesson for me, especially when I am stuck in unhealthy perfectionism. (To be clear, there is no other kind of perfectionism.) You don't have to map out every journey in detail before you begin. What matters most is A) that you start and B) that you pay attention. It's the paying attention part--the mindfulness--that lets us know what adjustments to make as we go along.

Surely our resistance to this idea is why new year's resolutions have gotten such a bad rap. We may start something with the best of intentions, but once we hit a bump or two in the road, rather than making a mid-course correction, we give up and decide to wait for next year. In effect, we keep running back to the curb that we finally stepped away from. No wonder we aren't getting anywhere.

This year, I had a little chat with myself about this tendency before I made my resolutions. The list of things I want to work on right now is far too long to do flawlessly, so I had to accept the fact that if I was going to do them at all, I'd have to be willing to do them imperfectly. Whether everything is going as I'd like or not, I remind myself to keep moving and keep paying attention. I can slow down if I need to, or make any number of other changes, but I no longer want to keep running back to the same curb I've already spent so much time on.

Also, there's no particular magic in January 1 as Step-Off-the-Curb Day. It works at least as well on Epiphany (January 6) or your birthday or a week from Tuesday. Better yet, you can choose right now. Employ the phrase we used as children: Ready or not, here I come!
 
Another familiar saying was: Practice makes perfect. I now prefer: Practice makes progress. I'm applying this adage to my meditation practice. While meditating, our mind inevitably wanders. We gently guide it back to the breath--or our mantra, or the candle flame, or whatever point of focus we have chosen. If it wanders 10 times (and it will...), we bring it back 11. If it wanders 100 times (and it will...), we bring it back 101. 100,000 wanderings; 100,001 returns. The next day, we do the same thing again. We musicians are accustomed to this kind of routine. Practice. It's how we improve.

If we gave up the first time our mind wandered, no one would ever learn to meditate. If a baby stopped trying any of the first dozen times she fell, no baby would ever learn to walk. If an oboe player stopped playing after the first squeak, there would be no oboists. Making mistakes isn't an interruption in our learning, it's a vital part of the learning process.

A couple of days ago, I decided to add 2 more minutes to the 10 minute meditation sessions I started January 1st. My initial goal was to spend a minimum of 5 minutes a day meditating (which is still my bottom line) but I'd been doing 10 minutes at a time most days until I listened to the panel discussion above on the science of mindfulness, in which a neuroscientist describes a study of pre-deployment Marines who were taught to meditate before they were sent to Afghanistan. 

It turned out that as little as 12 minutes of meditation per day helped the Marines' attention and working memory remain stable while deployed. Those who were not meditating experienced a degradation of attention and working memory. Many of the Marines who initially chose not to receive the training ended up asking for it, once they saw how much better their meditating buddies were sleeping and how they seemed to avoid "the shakes."

When I learned that 12 minutes appeared to be the tipping point, I added two more minutes to my meditations. I'm using the free version of an iPhone app called Insight Timer to easily time and keep track of my sessions, so all I had to do was change the setting from 10 minutes to 12. I have to admit that sitting even just two minutes longer was definitely noticeable. I got antsy toward the end. But I've only done 12 minute sessions a couple of times, so I think I'll adjust, just as I did to 10 minutes. Eventually, I'd like to increase my meditations to 15 minutes, and ultimately as long as 20, but for now I'm quite happy with 12.

If you tend to think of mindfulness or meditation as nebulous, useless, or too "woo-woo" to be of any value, it's worth learning about this science. If you don't have an hour and 15 minutes to spare to hear the video above, you can fast forward to about 51:45 to hear about the study of the Marines that I mentioned.

So... Have you been able to keep moving toward your most recent goals? Does the pace feel right to you? Is it getting easier or more difficult, over time? What kinds of adjustments might be helpful as you continue to move forward?