Tag Archives: habit

Meditation fail

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I’ve been ‘pretending’ to meditate for years now. I’m not berating myself. I know that meditation is a journey, not a destination, and that the practice itself is as much about bringing your focus back as it is staying focused. I get it. I just haven’t really done it.

My monkey mind doesn’t stay on anything long enough to call it meditation. In a typical meditation I’ll focus on my breath and that won’t last 2 minutes. I’ll do a guided meditation and not too far into it discover that I haven’t been listening for a while. I’ll get to the end of a meditation and realize that I’ve been daydreaming for as long as I can remember trying to meditate.

My mediation time in any given session last as long as the dog’s attention in the movie ‘Up’, where every few seconds he’s distracted by the idea of a squirrel. This isn’t once in a while, this is… Every. Single. Session. And it has gotten worse rather than better.

Meditation time has become distracted time. A pause in my day where I put a meditation on, but my mind doesn’t stay on it. In a 10 minute meditation I might count 6-7 breaths before my mind wanders or wonders. Even if I recognize that I’ve drifted away, I don’t really get back to it. Or my attention is even shorter the next time.

I need to change things up. What I’m currently doing is not working for me, and I’ve been at it way too long to accept that my poor follow through is the best that I can do. I’m not sure what I’m going to change yet, but I can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. And if I’m honest, for the amount of time I’ve put into meditation, I really suck and have seen no improvement. It’s time to take a break and come back to this habit later. Hopefully with a new, more effective approach.

More on writing every day

“When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can start working on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30pm because it’s ready, It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we are creative, we are creative because we ship. Take what you get, and commit to a process to make it better.” Seth Godin, ‘The Practice’.

Seth has written over 7,000 blog posts on his daily blog, dating back to 2002. One interesting point that he makes is that no matter how many posts he writes, 50% of them are his worst 50%, and not as good as the other half. It’s impossible to do better than that. It’s not about doing great work every day, it’s about ‘shipping’ work every day. It’s about being creative every day, it’s about the process… the practice.

I’ve written pieces that I’ve thought were quite good, and no one will probably ever look back at them. I’ve knocked off a quick post with little thought, and it garnishes comments and positive feedback… and occasionally these two things coincide. But it’s not accolades or attention that matters to me nearly as much as the commitment to write every day. To do the creative work. To wordsmith, to ponder, to question, and to practice the art of writing.

So forgive the typos, the comma splices, the run on sentences. Indulge me when I intentionally break convention. Like this. This is my muse, and I do my best to ship every day. And exactly half of the time, you’ll get better than average work from me.