Stirring the Stew

by Susan Griffin

When I realized that it was time for me to write about Serenity for this issue, I felt completely unqualified. I kept wracking my brain for anything to write about. Nothing settled in my mind until I remembered a time when I attended a Buddhist service in which they "sat." Done in twenty-five minute increments, these sittings were flanked by five minutes of walking meditation. A single bell tone would begin and end the sitting meditation.

My first lesson that morning was this:

Twenty-five minutes is a long time.

As I sat there, desperately trying to hold my thumbs millimeters apart and keep some form of the lotus position intact, I thought about everything in the world: I had laundry to do and since I didn't have a washer/dryer I would have to go to the laundromat. I needed to get cat litter from the grocery store. I had to save enough money to make rent this coming month. I wish I had generous parents to help me out in times like these. My internal dialog kept going at sixty miles an hour even while I was completely still on the mat. I imagined my mind as a cluttered cooking range that day, each heating element supporting pots and pans. Some were covered, some exposed, but all rolling at a dangerously healthy boil. Just as a busy kitchen is full of chaos, so was my crowded, simmering mind.

Unfortunately, the goal is to clear one's mind when one is sitting. But a busy mind was the least of my worries. Once I got the thumb-placement down, my leg fell asleep from my hip all the way to my toes. I tried to flex my muscles and regain some feeling but it just didn't work. So in addition to thinking about everything in the world, I was now wondering how I would be able to do walking meditation with only one good leg.

The bell rang and all the other people who had been sitting stood up. Walking meditation is done very slowly, so each person got up very deliberately. It seemed that they were trying to unfold themselves from the lotus position in one fluid movement, stopping only once they were standing erect. I secretly hoped that they were all suffering from their legs being asleep, too. And then I noticed that I was the only one not standing.

I had no choice; my leg was as dead and heavy as a slab of marble.

Then the needles started. I flexed my leg and the discomfort intensified. I didn't want to move my leg again; the sensation was too uncomfortable to bear in silence. But then I did move my leg, and the feeling started to return. By the time the walking meditation line came back around to me, I was hesitantly standing, putting weight first on my good leg and then on my bad one, trying to test it out. I joined them at the end of the line, still unsure whether I would be able to walk.

And then something miraculous happened:

I was so concerned with not falling over that I had to concentrate completely on just putting one foot in front of the other with slow deliberation.

The world went away. My self-image and all those issues went away. My troubled thoughts about my family were gone. All the good and bad and nagging things that rattle around in my brain disappeared. Somehow I was able to turn the heat down on all the cooking pots in my mind.

For five full minutes, I placed all the power of my fully concentrating brain on the shuffling of my two feet, one of which was still all tingly. Within those minutes, I felt truly serene. I could fairly feel the balance of the universe as I roll-stepped my way around the quiet room.

And, continuing to place one foot in front of the other, I didn't fall down.

How miraculous would we be if we could all quiet our minds enough just to concentrate on the task at hand? Usually my mind is just like it was that day at the sitting: a huge cooking range with six large elements, each eye with its own pot of mystery stew. Most of the time, I do well to keep all the pots at a slow simmer. Often, however, I am too busy trying to stir all the pots at once to keep all the stews from scorching. I only wish that I could master the art of thinking through things one at a time, stirring each stew lovingly until it is perfectly completed while not letting the other pots boil over. In fact, I guess the trick to serenity is not necessarily to learn to stir one stew at a time but to remove all but one of the stews from the range altogether.

And also not to add too much salt.