The Good Ear

You cry while laughing much?  I don't, but I am, even as I type.  My cold has driven me to bed, and keeps me here, but Felix is sitting outside my bedroom door, singing to himself, loudly.  Every time I get ready to yell at him I start laughing, and crying.  And if I shout with laughter in my voice he hears only the merriment and takes it as encouragement; in trying to turn him off I've so far only succeeded in ratcheting up the volume.  No nap for me.

OK, I've finally managed to call him into the room, and by pretending to be angry and threatening not to give him any more snacks today, I've silenced him...temporarily.  Sounds cruel, I'm sure, stomping on my boy's creative instincts so.  Unless you're a parent, in which case I'm sure you understand completely.

This inclination to sing is a mixed blessing.  I have a good ear, Talia too, and Felix, it seems, has inherited these abilities.  He loves to sing, does it all the time, usually in tune, and often with lyrics of his own devising.  How amusing!  How creative!  Ultimately, how annoying!

How much of this am I supposed to put up with?  How much of it can I stand?  I don't know if I'm peculiarly prone to getting bits of music trapped in my head, but for sure it's a vulnerability of mine, and a devastating one.  The wrong sample can easily ruin a day, driving me to distraction or worse, and apt not to poison just one but to pop up again every few days for a week or two before finally disappearing...until the next time.

I am used to Felix infecting our household with the disease of the week, acquired in the pathogenic scrum that is a gregarious child's milieu.  He picks up as well a large variety of memes, some--superheroes, "Star War"--more commercial than--chasing people with sticks--others, at school and on the playground.  And then there are the songs.  We have been careful to steer him towards Elizabeth Mitchell and away from Rafi, that is to say to expose him to the less virulent of the childrens' corpus.  Our defense, I realize, is incomplete, as he bursts into a rousing round of "Bob the Builder, can we do it? YES WE CAN!"  Where did you learn that?  I DON'T KNOW!

Now he is being totally quiet, and that is the worst sound of all.

Find Yourself

"California," exhorts the California Travel & Tourism Commission, "Find Yourself Here."  Certainly I have been trying, and some of that finding, or looking at any rate, has been, well, very Californian.  Most especially this:  I meditate.  As with all self-help regimes and most people, I don't do it as often as I would like, nor as regularly, but I have certainly never done it before and now, I think I can honestly report, I do.  By great good fortune a near--close by, close to our hearts--friend of ours is an adept in these matters and was thinking of organizing a weekly "sit" even before I mentioned the matter to him.  The result is that I and a small handful of co-seekers get together each Wednesday for an hours' talk and half an hour or so of sitting with our eyes closed.

I'm not sure how to describe it less literally. I have no expectations, no demands, and no justification.  I just sit, pretty much every Wednesday, and I try to sit for a bit every other day, too (it is there, despite sitting, that I typically fall down).  I have abandoned any expectation that in sitting I would find myself in a state of non-thought, but tend instead to abstract myself somewhat from the thoughts that do arise.  This allows me, to the limited extent I am able, to view the flow of my thoughts, most often turbulent, sometimes reasonably measured, variable in any case.

And what does this view afford?  Certainly no great insights, no especial wisdom, and yet I do feel I profit from it.  Boredom, my great bugbear in life, has for some months been banished by the ever-present possibility (or perhaps threat is the correct term?) of my entering a meditative state.  I ask myself more frequently, if not frequently enough, why I am allowing myself to run away with a particular thought or feeling (typically my other great bugbear, annoyance).  And, with enough concentration, and more and more often, I am able to disassociate myself from my physical sensations just enough to lose a clear sense of my own physical dimensions, which is to say that sometimes, while meditating, my head, starting with my teeth and spreading outwards from there, starts to feel really, really big.  It's neat.

Felix has my number.  He asked Talia the other evening where I was.  Upon hearing I was at my meditation class he said "Oh, that's where dada sits and waits for something to happen."  Still waiting, boy, still waiting.

(For Felix's own meditation practice see this link.)