Writing As Daily Meditation

An Experiment: Part 1

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” Kurt Vonnegut

My first real job—after the Air Force and college and a spell of kicking around construction work—was as a petty bureaucrat in a university administrative office. I loathed that job, but nevertheless had to deal with it. To cope, I used to end each work day by sitting down at my desk and letting my thoughts roll out onto the notebook I kept in my top drawer. I wrote about how I might better organize my work or discipline myself to get through my to-do list or navigate a path through a personality problem between colleagues. It helped. Ideas and insights flowed down my arm and out through the pen to the paper like magic. This was a workaday prototype of the travel journals I would later keep in India and Argentina when I’d said goodbye to that job. The journals were not simply places to record conversations and body language, thoughts and descriptions, but places to discover how and why, and later turn into short stories.

Vonnegut points us in the right direction. Revising, especially, is meditative. Done with the right spirit, we surprise ourselves with what bubbles up onto the page from that inner well of silence we all carry. We somehow get the rough draft down, the Sloppy Copy, and sit alone trying to find the exact word or turn of phrase for an idea or feeling or dream we want to bring into being. In doing so, we begin to discover what the story really is, what it insists on being but hasn’t yet revealed to us. How eventually the sudden flashes of whimsy, the surprising plot twists, or thematic insights make their way into consciousness expressed on the page remains a mystery, but come they do. We fiddle with tiny changes. A comma here, a more active verb there. Then nothing until a wave of dialogue or description we can hardly keep up with. Maybe we miss a piece. Weren’t fast enough. If it was good, we think, it will reappear, though often it never does.

The same is true in sitting meditation. We go to the place set aside for the ritual of quieting our minds. We stretch. Sit. Watch our breathing. Perhaps walk through a daily visualization or a set of reminders, thoughts as a work-in-progress that we revisit and amend each day. Along the way, but not always, we have small insights that seem to come from that inner well of silence that we usually don’t notice. The act of writing and the act of meditating are meant to cultivate our noticing. We hope to surprise ourselves at every session. And, true, in sitting meditation, as in writing, sometimes our insights evaporate. They escape through the air vents. Poof. If they are worth anything, they’ll come back, we think. Sitting meditation is a beautiful thing, and indeed some insights, however powerful, are phantoms hard to find again.

So I want to try an experiment. What would it be like to submit my daily meditation practice to the writing process? That is, rough draft, revision, revision, revision, etc., etc., through final draft, and editing—all on a deadline of a new section each Wednesday for the Weekly Monthly Story Journal. Seeing words on the page, like hearing yourself say something out loud, can be surprisingly different from only thinking them. By extension, how do I really know what I think until I see what I have written?

Remembering that I am a very bad Buddhist, I wonder what this exercise will do for my practice. 

One thing, though. Please understand that this is not an experiment to set myself up as a meditation teacher. My temperament is not suited to be anyone’s guru. I pray that sanctimony will please, please keep far, far away. Anything here vaguely stinking of it is sadly misplaced. Delusional. Lord forbid that I trade my well-earned reputation as a curmudgeon for sugary preacher. This experiment is an extension of my meditation practice, nothing more. If something in it is helpful to you, great. I suspect much may resonate while some will leave you shaking your head and clicking your tongue.

Watch for “Where I Start” next Wednesday.