Living for Clarity

[Guest guest]

The other day, walking along a campus path, an epiphany: I live for

moments of clarity.

 

It's that thing everyone experiences from time to time, when something

all of a sudden becomes crystal clear in your mind: an idea completes

its traced circle, an issue becomes resolved, a situation gets

unstuck. You know just the right thing to say, to do, or to be.

 

Life is constructed of such situations, questions, threads. Each day

is the experience of wrestling with these things, or just holding them

in hand, looking at them directly or obliquely, from this perspective

or that. Each night you sleep with them, and occasionally their

mystery gets deepened in the course of a dream's timeless epic.

 

So I felt, it's not a bad way to live... walking along the banks of a

meandering stream, now and then crossing it to the other side, hopping

from rock to solid rock of understanding. The act of crossing the

stream symbolizing the mental breakthrough of Clarity.

 

Life being what it is, though, we often don't cross this stream--or

even understand that we need to get across to fix or resolve

something, rooted as we are in the comfort and familiarity of the side

we are on. We often choose the inertia of no change, rather than risk

the unknown ... but then life, and time, then compels its draconian

way of forcing the issue and we lurch across on loose rocks or shaky

logs. Often, slipping on the muddy shallows of Confusion.

 

In today's culture of speedy information and instant gratification,

being deliberate and measured, even slow, is not a virtue. Everything

seems to be moving at lightspeed, and there's a sense that there's not

enough time for what we want or need to do. One is often forced to go

with the vertiginous flow of this digitally mediated stream... giving

in to the sensory overflow, yielding to happenstance and contingency.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Clarity can be gained by

deliberately slowing down. This is nothing new. Anyone who practices

meditation knows what that feels like.

 

My epiphany, then, was that I live for those moments of understanding,

moments that come about due to a singular meditative flow. And that

the state of meditation can come about in an almost infinite variety

of ways. And I'll end this weblog entry by identifying just one of

those: circularly, recursively, it's the act of setting aside a little

time each day to write in one's weblog. ::chuckle:: Yes, I consider

this my meditation. Or one form of it, at any rate.

 

So, slow down, dear reader. And go write. Whether it be on your own

weblog, or on a sheet of paper for no one to read. You just might be

surprised where your words will lead you.

 

~ from The Free Radical, http://l.editthispage.com