#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
move twice as slow, notice twice as much (a fav Kat quote of mine)
^^ if you prefer listening instead of reading, this one’s for you!
Light and shadow refracted off the backs of my fingers as I gently danced them against the seat in front of me. Pressure built behind my eyes and I felt the cathartic burn of a fresh coat of salty solvent wash from eyelid to eyelid. Two more sets of eyes popped over the seat before me, these ones owned by toddlers who took delight in making eye contact with strangers on the train as a deeper means of connection before words are available to them. Their foreheads would slowly creep over the back of the seat until our gazes quickly met before they dodged away, back into the comfort of the pocket before them to share giggles with each other and cue their mom into the game that they’d invented. It was absolutely adorable. And I was already emotional so of course every bit of this moment played into the romanticized narrative I was luxuriating in on my way out of the city to upstate New York to stay in a tiny home for a couple of nights.
I’d reached my limit. The rituals and routines that make me feel sane had lost their potency. I’d spent the weekend before doing everything that usually helps me reset (ie spending time creatively with friends, long walks, yoga, meditation, journaling, etc.) and none of it was bringing me back to a place of calm.
As true as last week’s newsletter was about figuring out what motherly maternal voice suits the present version of myself, I had gotten lost in my own story. I had placed a sense of calm, peaceful, contentedness on the other side of a finish line and finding this maternal voice became the pathway to get there. I started to get bored of my own story. This idea of no longer knowing how to take care of myself because I had so much fun this summer became so ridiculous that I stopped believing it too. I don’t even know where it came from besides maybe talking too much about the seasons changing and feeling an internal sense of disease that I needed a good story to sink my teeth into for rationalization purposes.
But what I really wanted and needed was to feel grounded again. And when Kat shared this quote with me last week, something clicked. I was reminded of the concept of instantaneous arrival.
“We think that changes in ourselves can come about in time, that order in ourselves can be built up little by little, added to day by day. But time doesn’t bring order or peace, so we must stop thinking in terms of gradualness. This means that there is no tomorrow for us to be peaceful in. We have to be orderly on the instant.”
JD Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, page 72
There is no tomorrow for us to be peaceful in.
We have to be orderly on the instant.
Those words cut through the cruft of the story that I was telling myself about the arduous process that I needed to go through in order to rewire my internal dialogue away from the fun of the summer and back into a state of retreat. No, this quote said. You already have the tools. You know exactly what you need. The only thing between there and there is the belief that there’s a long process ahead of you.
Sure, thoughts spontaneously arise. All the damn time. But from a state of present minded awareness, we have the choice to continue thinking them. Or not. And I chose in that moment to stop it. To put down my weapons. And that if I wanted to feel contentment again, there was nothing metaphysically stopping me from experiencing it right then and there.
I didn’t need to go upstate and stay in an Airbnb to do that. But it felt like the next step of commitment that I wanted to make for myself.
I absolutely love spending time alone. But at the suggestion that I get out into nature, I found myself immediately gripping for community. I also had been struggling to just sit with myself. I tried a little self retreat a few weekends ago and I wrote about a blissful Saturday morning of getting lost in the miles that I ran. And then Sunday came around and all of the sudden I needed to text every single person in my contacts to see if they wanted to come co-exist in the park with me. I was out of practice of actually doing things on my own. And so I needed to break the seal.
Half the battle was fought and won already by the time I confirmed payment on the Airbnb. Being on the train was the next step. I was warned that I may feel the wobbles. That when you move from a state of hyper-distractedness to calm again, you can feel wanky. Unsettled. And I did. When I first arrived here, I felt really alone. That doesn’t bother me. But what was bothering me was the indecision that I started to feel creep back in.
I spent a month alone in Europe last year and one of my biggest takeaways was that I am not actually an indecisive person. Don’t laugh. I actually have a very strong intuitive muscle that I listen to effortlessly and often subconsciously when I am alone. But when I am around other people, I outsource my own desires by taking theirs into account first. So once I stripped that by going upstate, I started to notice how much I was narrating the experience from the POV of telling people about it in the future. Okay I do recognize that I am doing that now haha but the difference was in making the decision to do things with the very intent of telling people about it or sharing an experience that I had after the fact with the intent of making anyone who is in a similar boat feel seen and perhaps even inspiring you to carve time out for yourself in a similar way. I had no plans when I got here. I just wanted to walk a lot and meditate. But then I realized that the Airbnb was on a property backed up against a single lane 50 mph highway with no sidewalk and in order to get to any park, it would be a 25-30 min Uber. Fuck. I thought to myself. I probably should have rented a car so that I could do that hike that’s around here. The one that my Airbnb host recommended. It’s 45 mins away but screw it why don’t I just go tomorrow. It’ll be beautiful and it’s the “thing to do” while you’re here.
I was distracted again. Did I really want to do that or was I just trying to be the type of person that does whatever the damn thing is when they’re there?
I sat with that thought for a moment. What I really wanted was to feel grounded. So if that meant staying on the property of the Airbnb for 48 hours without leaving once, that was what I was going to do. I heard my intuition again. I stopped externalizing my wants and needs to my perception of other people’s opinions and I listened to myself.
While glancing through Sam Harris’s Waking Up app for some longer meditations, I saw that he has a half-day retreat on the app (here’s a link to try for free for 30 days if you so desire. Chris Hall intro’d me in 2018 and it’s been my fav meditation tool since). Woah. I wonder if I could sign off work tomorrow early and do this retreat?
I did.
And I am really lucky that I have the freedom and spontaneous flexibility to do that. I texted my family and colleagues that I would be unavailable for about 6 hours in the afternoon/evening and I sat with myself.
Some of the meditations were more challenging than others. But I was reacquainted with a quiet part of myself that I had forgotten existed.
In the midst of experiencing and reaching for so much excitement this summer, I forgot how good contentedness feels.
In one of the sessions, Joseph Goldstein talks about a longer retreat that he was on in which his yogi duty was to chop vegetables. He particularly enjoys this task even though he’s not the best in the kitchen. One day, he spent his shift slicing eggplant. His cuts were erratic and imprecise. But he turned them into the next station and they were fashioned into plexi glass dishes with layers of cheese, sauce, breadcrumbs, and all of the other accouterments.
After the morning meditation, they sat down to lunch. No eggplant parmesan. That’s weird, he thought. Maybe they’re serving it later today, he told himself to reconcile his wondering inner dialogue. Dinner came. No eggplant parmesan. Lunch the next day? Nope. And for dinner? Still no. Three days of this went by and he started to really self-flagellate. My eggplant pieces must have been so uneven that they had to throw the entire dish away.
Only later did he learn that they’d frozen them to have on hand in a week or so.
We do this all of the time though. We create these catatonic narratives in our minds about what happened, why things are the way that they are, and how everyone hates us. It’s exhausting and fruitless.
And in hearing this story, I realized how much I had been doing this lately too. Making things so personal. And mistaking “collecting my own data” for the assumptions that I was making about how other people perceive of my actions.
I kept on telling myself that I felt so spun out.
And then I dropped it all.
We have to be orderly on the instant.
There is no tomorrow to be peaceful in.
Peace exists right here, right now.
I’ve been reminded.
I do have a strong intuition.
I know what it feels like for an emotion to arise and to not have to assign any meaning to it at all.
That it will metabolize in a matter of seconds if I just sit with it. Without perpetuating any more narrative.
Jealousy arises, let it pass.
Distraction arises, that’s okay too.
My heart starts to beat and my jaw clenches and my saliva turns bitter. Notice it.
Release it.
Let it go.
Breathe.
That’s what I did for 6 hours. And what I will continue practicing for a while.
We go through phases in life. I used to be much more disciplined in my practice of meditation. It felt good to exist in a season of not needing that. But to come back to it again, to arrive at this feeling of quiet homecoming also feels really good.
Every year, around this time, I have a desire to feel grounded. Often, that feels to me like being willing to break the status quo in order to show up for myself fully so that I can extend the same generosity outwards. To sit peacefully so that I can let anger, rage, frustration, fear, jealousy, uncertainty, and greed dissipate so that when I am in conversation with you, I am fully present. I am gazing into your eyes with the selflessness that I felt in a mirror mediation. You momentarily lose your grip on the perception of being in your own head, centrally located behind your own eyes and feel the egolessness of gazing deep into someone elses. Even though the gaze that’s catching you on the other side of the mirror is actually your own. It’s one of the coolest feelings in the world. I want to do more of that.
I recognize that historically when seeking out a feeling of groundedness, I have fell short by overly relying on self-control and restraint. That’s not what this is. This is a commitment to myself from a place of fundamental self-trust, love, and generosity. The same type that I feel when calling to mind the people I love most.
Cute aggression is the grippy feeling that you get of just wanting to squeeze a cute puppy when you see it. Or loving someone so much that you just want to grab them. That feeling of warmth, of wanting them to be happy, of wishing them well. The glow that you feel when you think about the people you love most experiencing genuine happiness. That is what I want for every single person reading this. And in knowing what that feels like in my body when I think of all of you feeling such genuine health, love, and contentment in your lives helps me get to a place of extending that desire to my own self.
Don’t recall.
Don’t imagine.
Don’t think.
Don’t examine.
Don’t control.
Rest.
— Jayasāra, Six Words of Advice, Waking Up App
Each of these pillars were reflected upon in a meditation session during the retreat. And I resolve to keep this in mind as I go back to the city. There is no reintegration. There is just a remembering of how much I enjoy my solitude and relationship with myself and a trust that this part of me is with me wherever I go.
As I sat down with myself on this little retreat, I saw the version of myself come back online that did much more of this when I was 19 in yoga teacher training and 20 in New Zealand doing all sorts of solo travel and experiences. As I walked through large residential neighborhoods in Beacon, NY I was reminded of the version of myself that lived in a senior living home in Dallas for a summer and went on long (lost) walks alone in search of the quietness of my voice and recognition of my intuition again.
The more we give ourselves the space and time to change scenery and remember other iterations of ourselves that existed, the more we build the muscle of coming back. Back to the breath. Back to present awareness of a thought crossing our minds. Back to our ability to not need to assign any more meaning to the things. At all. Point blank.
And so back I go. Committed to giving myself more breathing room like I just did. Deeply grateful for the support I have in my life to be able to do things like this. Reminded of what forgiveness and unconditional love feels like for myself and by extension, for everyone around me.
We cannot think our way out of problems.
Instantaneous arrival is possible. It is indeed possible to find order in this present moment.
And also, we are on an endless path of coming back. It’s not that we arrive in an instant and all is resolved forever and always. It’s that we can get there in an instant and bring ourselves back when the mind inevitably takes us to other places. Because it will. And that’s okay too. If you can find order in this moment. This one, right here. You can find order at any damn time. And that thought alone, gives me the contentedness of a lifetime.
That’s all for today. Thank you for reading or listening! I will Catch you here next week.
xx,
Char
**And an always thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of Tiantian Ma this week! Always blown away by the pieces that she pulls.
Curator’s notes:
Very transcendentalist in a way, in the sense of landscaping and needing to look twice
Finding order in nature, but also respecting and finding beauty in the inherent chaos
Char’s Web Song of the Week
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
Charlotte, yes! This is it! I love your reflections and explorations of your own mind. It is so beautiful to have space with yourself and to notice where your mind goes and what you have been habituated to focus on. Also the remembering that peace (or enlightenment or nirvana or whatever) is accessible to us is any given moment. We don’t need the off grid retreat house or a million hours of meditation, although that can be helpful. But a lot of times we just need to do the damn thing so that we are able to cultivate that inner space. I love this all so much and can resonate a lot with what you are writing/thinking. Looking forward to see how these thoughts and practices develop xx