This time it was different.
I knew something had to change, and I knew it had to be me.
I had just returned home from my 11th treatment center. Even before I left, I knew I could not keep living the way I had been living. Something had to change. But how?
How was I supposed to change myself when nothing I had tried before seemed to last?
For the 11th time, I had also been introduced to meditation. I say reintroduced because there are only so many tools a treatment center has to offer, and meditation had crossed my path many times before.
I had always liked meditation, except for two things.
First, it took time.
Second, it took practice. Daily practice.
I once heard someone describe meditation in two very simple steps: do it, and keep doing it.
That sounded easy enough. But the thing that had always kept me from practicing consistently came down to one problem.
I could close my eyes in a quiet, controlled environment and calm myself. I could sit still, breathe, notice my thoughts and let them pass. At one point in my life, I even meditated for twenty minutes twice a day.
But what about the rest of the day?
If I spent forty minutes meditating and seven hours sleeping, that still left roughly 980 minutes with my eyes open.
Those were the minutes in which I actually lived.
They were spent at work, at home, dealing with money, family, health, expectations, disappointments and other people. They were spent in environments I could not control and that were often anything but quiet, calm or peaceful.
That was where people talked at me, and where I talked at them.
It was where turning on the news could instantly stir sympathy, anger, fear or disgust.
It was where financial scarcity felt real.
It was where uncertainty lived.
And for me, underneath much of it was a kind of persistent dis-ease. Fear seemed to accompany nearly everything I thought about, like an invisible companion.
So the real question became:
Could I learn to meditate with my eyes open?
In quiet meditation, I had been taught not to fight my thoughts. I could notice them, even befriend the difficult ones, without grabbing hold of them. I did not have to believe every thought. I did not have to follow every thought. I could allow it to come and allow it to go.
But with my eyes open, something was different.
In sitting meditation, many of the thoughts disturbing me were about things that had already happened or things I feared might happen.
With my eyes open, the disturbance was often happening right in front of me.
Someone really did say something hurtful.
A bill really did arrive.
The news really was troubling.
A relationship really was strained.
A problem really did need to be faced.
The events were real.
What I began to see, however, was that my interpretation of them was not always as solid as I thought. My mind could take something difficult and turn it into something unbearable. It could turn uncertainty into catastrophe, disagreement into rejection, inconvenience into injustice and fear into certainty about a future that had not yet happened.
That was where the practice began.
I needed teachers. I needed people who had walked some of this ground before me. For me, many of those teachers came through books, lectures and conversations. I also needed something beyond myself—a power greater than my own frightened thinking—to which I could release what I could not control.
And then I needed practice.
Lots of practice.
The goal was not to become unaffected by life. It was not to become passive or indifferent. It was not to pretend that painful things were not painful.
The goal was to stop holding onto every experience as though I had to carry it with me.
Could an insult pass through me?
Could fear arise without becoming my master?
Could disappointment come and go?
Could I experience anger without feeding it for the next six hours?
Could something difficult happen without my mind immediately building a permanent home around it?
I began to think about the ocean.
A wave comes toward the shore with tremendous force. It crashes. It spreads across the sand. And then it recedes.
The shore does not chase after it.
Another wave comes.
And another.
Maybe learning to meditate with my eyes wide open meant learning to live more like that.
To experience what came.
To feel it.
To respond when a response was necessary.
And then, whenever possible, to let the wave pass.
That became the practice.
Not forty minutes a day with my eyes closed.
The other 980 minutes with my eyes wide open.