Many years ago I attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat. At the beginning of every meditation period, the teacher would instruct us with his hypnotic Indian accent to “start again, start again, start again”. His further advice when feeling distracted during meditation was to “start again”.
My teacher’s advice to start again is once more resonating in my consciousness. I made a commitment to myself to post a piece of my writing once a week during 2017 and last week I failed to do so. I once wrote about maintaining healthy habits while traveling, but during my current trip, I have found it difficult to follow my own advice, at least where writing is concerned. I am a person who thrives on routine, which is ironic since I don’t like to be in one place for too many months at at time.
It would be easy enough at this point to just forget about my commitment to post once a week and save myself the trouble. This is the way good habits die: you miss one day and decide you have failed, so why bother. But progress comes from not letting ourselves off the hook so easily.
Fall down nine times,
Get up ten.
Zen Proverb
And so here I sit, with keyboard in front of me, wanting to be doing something less difficult but ultimately less rewarding. In my mind, I hear a familiar voice slowly repeating:
“Start Again. Start Again. Start Again”.
We’ve been back in Spain for only a week now, but it almost feels like we never left, as if the last ten months back in the United States were only a dream. There is something about being in a foreign country, particularly one where I do not know the language, that makes me feel like time is behaving differently. The days here seem to move more slowly than back at home. A day feels like a week. Perhaps it is because my mind is reeling from the overload of trying to comprehend words my eyes and ears do not yet understand. Perhaps it is because the landscape around me appears so different. Or maybe, just maybe, time does play by a different set of rules here, giving me instructions to slow down, relax a little bit more, and to know that whatever the clock may say, there is always time for joy.
Flashes of insight in the sunset,