Something About Walking Meditation

johnny garrido
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

I spend an awful lot of time lost in my own thoughts. I guess you could call me a day dreamer, or a space case, or Major Tom, all of which are cool nicknames for people who are really just so self-absorbed that the contents of their own head are more interesting than the world around them. Usually the thoughts I spend my time immersed in revolve around some sort of problem that I am having in my life, and potential solutions to that problem. Which is a sort of irony, I suppose, considering that a lot of problems I have would be solved by being present in the moment in the first place. Day dreaming begets day dreaming, the snake eats it’s own tail, we’re all trapped in a cycle, what came first? The chicken or the egg? Do any of these sound like they encapsulate my larger problem? Am I just conjuring fake platitudes?

From “I Don’t Need Eyes” by Lindsay Watson, courtesy of the Desert Island Comics tumblr.

So I’m taking steps to remedy this. Meditation is helpful, if practiced consistently. Particularly walking meditation. The basic idea is that you walk forward* and you pay attention to every footfall. Heel touching the ground, ball of the foot, toe in the air, knees moving forwards and backwards and muscles pulling and all those bodily functions that seems so oddly organic when we feel them, instead of the mechanical quality that we ascribe to them when we think about them. And then while you’re doing this, you also just look at the world around you and notice it as it’s happening, without ascribing any sort of judgement. That’s the really hard part for me, just seeing without also adding little backstories. Like, say, there’s an elderly woman and a young boy walking down the sidewalk, and the kid is really more jumping than walking as he steps on every single crack (or at least attempts to, because he’s pretty short and doesn’t actually have a long enough gait to match the spacing of the pavement), but I don’t usually just see that. Usually I’m also adding that this elderly woman is his grandmother, and they’re out on a walk because it’s a nice day out, and maybe the grandmother looks a little frustrated, and maybe that’s because she’s the kind of person who’s a real stickler about “blood” in the family and this kid is actually not related to her, it’s actually her step-grandchild, but the father expects her to treat him like he’s actually her grandchild and she just doesn’t have the energy to fight it, she figures she’s old and doesn’t haven’t any “real” grandchildren anyways, and so on, and you get the point. **

Even though I’m obviously aware that all of this backstory is a fiction the small problem is that then I emotionally respond to it as though it were true. I end up actually feeling negatively about the elderly woman because I disapprove of her fictional feelings towards this kid. The bigger problem is that next thing I know, I’m walking into a tree branch. While I’m spending all this time conjuring emotionally turbulent stories about an old woman I saw once, I’m not noticing the tree in my path, and I’m not noticing that my friend is waving at me across the street, and I’m not seeing some guy help another guy get up after falling, and I’m not seeing the rest of the world that exists around me. Any positives are drowned out by a fictional negative. Any more relevant and attention needing negatives are drowned out by a fictional negative. Sometimes I’m pretty sure you could set me on fire while I’m thinking and I’d just slowly burn to death, only noticing once the fire started melting my brain.

It’s a practice. It’s something you need to do a lot, every day, if you can, for at least a little bit. Don’t think about the fictional all the time. Don’t make things up. See them as they are and accept that not everything is deserving of further inquiry or imagination. Not that there isn’t a time and a place for such thoughts- but you need to be able to turn it off, too. Well, I won’t phrase this like a lesson. I’m the one who needs to be able to turn it off.

Heel on the ground, knees bending, toes in the air, elderly woman in a yellow sundress, young boy stepping on cracks, the plethora of shades of brown that color the bricks of a stout building, a sunflower with a missing petal, a man with an outreached hand towards a woman with a broad smile, a memorial for a kid hit by a car on the side of the road, the sun filtering through the leaves of a tree in a nice-looking way, heel on the ground, knees bending, toes in the air.

*Though, I suppose, you could walk backward. Or even sideways. Never really considered doing so, but don’t let convention hold you back.
**And so, she’s looking at this kid skipping down the street and she wants to feel that grandmotherly affection and think about how cute he is, but because of this colored perception of him as a “fake” grandchild she’s just frustrated instead. Look how stupid this kid looks, she thinks. He can’t even figure out that he’s too short to hit all the cracks! He’s gonna break his momma’s back!

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johnny garrido

Written by

minneapolis, mn // twenty-three // somewhere between insight and a panic attack

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