Getting there slowly

Who would think it's so hard to choose colours for one's tissue paper? Not me, that's for sure, until I came up against 18 different shades from a commercial supplier and practically had a meltdown. I guess I am exaggerating, but I found it stressful and, guess what, in the middle of the stress recognised that I haven't done any meditation recently (not even a minute at a time so I have no excuse) and that I hadn't done any more reading about happiness recently either. Hmm. Tut tut.

I made up for things slightly by taking 'Buddhism for Mothers' to darling daughter's swimming class and reading two chapters over a well-earned latte - particularly well-earned because in the interests of getting back on my diet I managed to resist the temptations presented by several large glass jars full of different delectable varieties of home-made biscuits that I could have ingested with said latte. You thought I must be driving darling daughter 25km each way to this particular swim school because of the excellence of the teaching, non? Little did you know it was because of the excellent cafe cuisine!

Anyhoo, I've broken the back of the book (not literally Bronwyn, if you're reading this - I promise it will come back to you with its spine intact!) in that I've progressed as far as chapter 8 now, which means I'm almost up to chapter 9 in which the mysteries of meditation are explained. It is one slight failing in the overall construction of the book: there are constant references to 'loving kindness meditation' as being something I really ought to do in order to feel better about myself and everyone around me, and yet one doesn't reach the instructions about meditation until chapter 9. This presents me, in particular, with a small problem in that having had reading competely spoiled for me by a 3-year humanities degree* I have now trained myself to read sequentially through books again and can't bring myself to skip forwards and backwards in the way I was wont to do. And this is really important because if I slip from the path of reading each chapter through in sequence I will START READING FORWARDS IN THE BOOKS I READ OUR DAUGHTER EVERY NIGHT - and I just can't do that. No. I view my triumph over my sense of frustration about reading a small amount of darling daughter's story every night as a sort of meditation in itself, so if I start skipping around I'll be sabotaging things won't I? World catastrophe would probably follow, so I won't start thank you.

All in all, my glass is almost full this evening (despite 10 days of guests in the house and the consequent lack of personal space that entails); it would be completely full except that I've already drunk some.




















* Weekly reading lists consisted of upwards of 50 theological texts so I became an expert speed-reader which totally ruined fiction for about 5 years!