Holding Sand

 My mother once gave me the sound advice to avoid holding tightly onto things (she was specifically talking about people at the time) because if you do, they have a habit of slipping away. She did this through a marvelous metaphor that went like this:

If you have sand in your hand and make a fist, the sand begins to fall out and you are left with less sand than you started with. If you gently cup you hand and let the sand come in however, it remains in your hand, and you can perhaps even add more.

This metaphor has stuck with me because it helped me with the problem that I was having back then. But I’ve come back to it again and again and slowly been realizing the smaller and more subtle ways that I grab onto things. These things are now always visible or tangible, but they still have important implications.

Take meditation. I meditate every day. It’s like brushing my teeth, I simply can’t skip this part of my day. But unlike brushing my teeth, which is a methodical and easy task to accomplish by following the same routine every day, the quality of my meditation changes from day to day (even from moment to moment).

There have been a few days, however, when I felt something profound. These meditations left me inspired and eager to come back to my meditation. The next time I sat, I would anticipate the same thrill that I felt in the previous one. I would try to replicate what I had thought or done the previous time, hoping that it would work again.

Invariably though, the next meditation rarely went as well as original. This is just how it often goes with meditation but I eventually realized that my attempt to replicate the good meditation was making current meditations less satisfying. It wasn’t just “how it goes,” it was my hand closing into a fist around my previous feelings in meditation, resulting in the sand of the potential of my present meditations falling out.

This is because meditation is not a routine activity. It is a creative. Not in the sense that I do something new every time I meditate, but because I need to approach it with fresh enthusiasm and joy every time. By holding onto the results of the previous meditation, I allowed that enthusiasm to become stale. What worked last time was because that was what I needed then. But this was now, and I needed to stay present to figure out what this moment needed rather than holding on to the past.

And isn’t that what meditation is for (in part)? To learn to stay in the present moment; to be content and grateful for what is now.

This probably resonates with me at the moment especially because I am in a period of waiting. After years of constant activity in which I was making everything happen, I have reached a point where I have done what I can and now need to wait before I can continue. There is a part of me that panics every night about this, feeling anxiety that I am not doing enough but another part has slowly been gaining strength. That part reminds me that frantic activity might look productive on the outside but those looks can be deceiving.

So now I wait and try to be content and grateful for what is now. Because this moment won’t come back. And hopefully, neither will I want it to.