Triangulating my whereabouts

I'm taking a meditation class. So far it's not the kind where you sit around the floor in your socks, although I've taken a class like that before, and I'm pro-sitting-on-the-floor-in-your-socks.

I used to have a fairly disciplined and regular yoga practice. I went to class for five years and practiced at home. Sometime in 2004, that started to fall victim to a more mainstream workout regimen and my inability to make the time for aerobic exercise and yoga. And I'm all the worse for it.

This class is offered through my alma mater/employer's continuing ed. program, and I've considered taking it for years. This time, I finally just signed up before I had time to cook up an excuse. I like that it's based on findings by folks like John Kabat-Zinn, whose book I read geez, like 11 years ago when I worked in a bookstore and could "check" books out. How cool is that, that employees could treat the store like a library?

We haven't actually started meditating (that comes with tomorrow's class), but we've been reading about why we should and the potential benefits. I'm pretty familiar with why I should meditate, thank you very much. I'm very in touch with how scattered and unproductive my thoughts are. They've been keeping me up every night.

So I'm ready to jump in there and give it another try. After I read Kabat-Zinn's book, I maintained a practice for a few months, but I was just starting to settle into it when I moved off to grad school and a new world of pain. Later I had my yoga practice, and that gave me a better sense of how, slowly and subtly, I could develop some skillful reactions. I understand where I need to go now, and I'm ready to put in the miles. (Did I just make a journey metaphor?)

My assignment for class this week is to reflect on the question, if your life were a book, what type would it be and what chapter are you on?

Of course, as a writer I'm tempted to propose some wildly improbable type of book. I'm a cookbook! No, I'm a manual for a chainsaw! But really, I try to view my life as a dark comedy. Things happen, and I usually manage to have a laugh about them at some point, or else I appreciate them for their poignancy, the way they are sad but illuminating.

And I am a plot junkie, always on the edge of my seat waiting for the next twist. I think this is one of the problems. I'm always looking ahead and trying to make up the story, like a character in your typical metafiction narrative. And we all laugh and feel sorry for the character--oh, she thinks she's so in control.

Maybe my location in this book is the end of a chapter, perpetually at the end of a chapter. All I know is, I am exhausted. I've been growing increasingly so for some months, both from the insomnia and from reaching a dead stop on this one fascinating little puzzle I've been working on for a while. It was a charming distraction for a while, and now it's taken over my life.

So here's to meditation, the antonym to distraction.