and 16000 cumulative minutes.
Yeah well, first off — This ain’t gonna be that meditation “changed my life for the better” article. If you’ve been following my blog for a while now, you probably have noticed that maybe like more than half of what I’ve written were about how much I hate my life. I still do, to be frank, and I’m writing this article right after a 30-minute meditation. That does not mean that I’m gonna diss meditation like it’s completely useless, though. There are two purposes to this article.
First off, to congratulate myself for reaching this milestone.
It’s kinda hard to imagine. Day by day, allocating time to observe my breath and doing nothing else, no matter what happened. Death of loved ones, heartbreaks, burnout from work, lack of sleep, suicidal ideations… they didn’t stop me from opening the application and start meditating. The counter increased by one daily, from the first 10 days, to the first 30 days, then to the first 100 days… and here I am. 365 days, 16000 minutes (> 266 hours) into the practice. Not the greatest, but still a good start.
That averages to about 43 minutes per day, but in reality, it’s the recent meditation length that increased it to this amount. For the recent few months, I’ve been trying to increase the daily meditation minutes to an hour a day, sometimes and hour and a half, sometimes splitting into two or three sessions. Other than that, it started as a couple of minutes per day (5–10? I can’t remember).
Now, I can’t really say if depression adds on to the challenge or not, because I never had the chance to meditate without being depressed. But I’d wager that the self-doubt, consuming negative thoughts, rumination, lack of motivation, etc, probably made it harder for me to stay on the course than if I’m a healthy individual, which makes this an even more significant achievement.
So yeah, you’ve made it, Danny.
Now the second part — how do I feel about it?
To be honest, I don’t know. Did it help? Maybe. Did it hurt? I guess so, especially in the beginning. Did my doctor notice anything? They say they do, but I don’t feel it.
So yeah… I really don’t know. Meditation didn’t really make me feel that life is any more worth living, but if it did, I probably wouldn’t be meditating until now, and I would’ve stopped long ago reaching the “enlightenment”. I guess one of the hardest thing in life is to decide what to do when you feel lost, uncertain, like in the midst of a mist.
It’s easy for any successful person to say “I did X and Y and persisted and that’s why I’m here”, but they might have forgotten the sheer anxiety from the uncertainty at each step, the feeling of struggle and helplessness from not seeing any fruits of your labor, not knowing if you’ll hit a dead end, or worse, not knowing if there’s even an end at all, sometimes feeling like there’s a blindspot, something I’m missing out that I just can’t see because I’m too stupid.
But I’m still going to continue meditating. Best case scenario, it has all the transformative effects other people promised. Worst case scenario… I can just kms and end all the failure, so I guess it’s a win either way.