The Inevitable Moment
Dancing Elephants Press Weekly Prompt 46 — Positive Impact
Pallid dusk lights were squeezing through the tinted glasses of the meditation hall. The wind blowing into the hall from the open vents near the ceiling held a faint promise of rain. The longish day was winding down and tomorrow promises to be a new beginning after what I went through in the course of the four-day yoga retreat.
The day was also grueling for the body, after sitting for prolonged hours on the floor in a cross-legged posture. I reckon my limbs are hardened to inflexibility and not cooperating with the torments of sitting on the floor. Though there was pain — within me I was feeling lighter, happier, and a little bit emptier.
I look around the hall. Many of my fellow participants seem to be in the same state as mine. I started scanning faces around me. Different expressions adorned the faces of my fellow riders of this meditation retreat. Some were ebullient, some were radiating, some were stony, some were somber, some were teary-eyed, and I could see a riot of different feelings and emotions throbbing around. Certainly, this program has deeply touched all of us.
Looking back
On a deeper contemplation, I was always gnawed by the constant train of thoughts running amok in my mind. Incessantly it emanates and keeps moving from one thought to another. The attention-grabbing social media — the Silicon Valley’s dopamine slot machines abet this gravy thought train to chug perpetually. It was a gilded burden to entertain this series of thoughts flowing out like water flowing out from the open shutters of a dam.
On the other end, I also realised slow is beautiful, slow is creative, and slow is the zone to be in. I wanted to slow down the thoughts, slow down the mind. Just be there, in the moment, not racing into the future or clawing back into the crevices of the past.
I know I live a blessed and graceful life juxtaposed to 99% of people living around me. I don’t have to worry about my next meal or my family’s being at least for the next few years. I have a roof over my head and a beautiful family around me. So I know I have no business to be burdened and train wrecked by the stream of thoughts.
But still, the mind is adept at concocting new situations, and new problems, sometimes it dumps me down into an inferiority complex, other times it is caught in the throes of imposter syndrome, yet other times caught up with the fear of failure. After sitting through this retreat I got this epiphany, the root cause for this perplexed mind and train of thoughts stems from my failure to accept this current moment.
Blame it on servile work culture, blame it on mimetic desires the mind is always in a what-if mode and looking for ways to derive maximum utilitarian value from every waking hour of the day. This calculative mind never settles, it is in a constant speculative mode, speculating on the future, speculating on how others think, speculating on plausible scenarios and outcomes.
Looking forward
At least today after the conclusion of this four-day retreat, it definitively felt like I was propelled into a transcendental realm out of the daily rigmarole. I kept ruminating over the progress made through the last four days, trying to nail the one thing, the seemingly magic potion which seems to quieten my mind quite a bit.
If there is one thing that I want to take away from this four-day retreat, it is this —
This moment is inevitable.
The acceptance of this inevitable moment looked like the escape hatch from the clutches of dopamine-induced reveries, the constant greed for putting my eyeballs into all the how-to articles, videos, and tutorials, and the never-ending fear of missing out.
What does it mean — when I say this moment is inevitable? Looks so simple and naive, yet it is so abstract and powerful.
Let me try to walk you through an example. We all go through many life situations — be it
- Kid has brought bad grades in her term exams or
- Driver has crashed the car and made a big dent or
- Team member has messed up with a deliverable causing significant customer pain
What are our instinctive reactions for any of those situations — anger, yelling, heckling? Seems familiar. Ok let me try and put my lesson into action now — the inevitability of this moment.
Which means,
- The car is damaged, customer has pain, grades are bad? Yes!
- Does anger/yelling/heckling change the results now? No!
- Can I escape out of this moment? No!
So the damage is already done, and it is now futile to fight against what has already happened. I remember the mantra “This moment is inevitable”. In this inevitable moment, I have only one choice which is to fully accept what has happened. I can’t change it. I can’t fight it. Once this acceptance percolates into me, I can now think of alleviating the pains and think of ways to handle this situation and wriggle out of it.
More importantly, accepting this inevitable moment stops converting the pain into suffering. Pain converts to suffering by projections of the mind, the very projections coming out of not accepting what is there in front of me and thinking of an imaginary world and situations that my mind is cooking up.
Take Away
All of us live in a world of our own expectations. And there is reality. There is a sweet spot where reality meets expectations. This sweet spot is our zone of happiness. But there is a lot of reality out there which doesn’t match our expectations. We can’t change it, we can’t fight it. The choice we have is to accept it gracefully.
The tool, the mantra, the elixir for this acceptance comes from acknowledging “This moment is inevitable”.
From this acceptance starts life.
