Dear Diary,
During the week, after finishing and delivering one of my work results, a person on the other end of the messenger emphasized that cooperation with me, its pleasantness and lightness, evoked the most pleasant feelings in them. I rejoiced at the openness, thanked them, and paused: it’s true indeed – not every completed work in life brings some weighty and clearly tangible financial gratification. But that gratification miraculously doesn’t run short if you see that the person on the other end of the message window, screen or cord thanks to you received, along with the desired product, a dose of good mood and good time, even if they don’t express it in words. You see how truly important it is in situations where cardinal unexpected leaps of the client’s thoughts equally cardinally throw you off track, to say the usual “damn it” not directly to the interlocutor but into the pillow, the mirror, or to the guppies in the aquarium, submerging your head in the latter, as a result of which you return to the conversation and with a smile say “No problems whatsoever, dear friend, it shall be done!” And this is important not because you won’t lose a client and/or will meet some ideal service rules – it’s important because upon completing the work you’ll feel that you received something more than merely a euro or a thank you. And if you received it, then, naturally, you became richer by that something.
And what does meditation have to do with this? – the regular reader of my cosmic chats with my virtual diary will ask. Here it – has nothing to do with anything :-) But so that the entry doesn’t entirely miss it either – a brief reminder: the highest point of meditativeness, and at the same time wisdom and the ability to make quick and correct decisions, a person in everyday life usually reaches… while driving a car. Especially at those moments when they’re doing it without being lost in thoughts about yesterday’s conversation with a client or the upcoming dinner. At that moment they are maximally calm and attentive, simultaneously able to encompass road signs, speedometer readings, a pedestrian standing on the sidewalk edge, a car following behind, a pothole approaching in the traffic lane. In a certain sense, the driver at that moment as if disappears, simultaneously merging into something unified both with their speeding car and, in part, with the environment surrounding them. Transferring this state to any work or personal activity makes it equally meditative, with attention scattered across the space and encompassing simultaneously each, even the smallest, detail of the performed activity, merging the performer and the performed into something one, unified and inseparable. Well, when a formation arises at the center of this space saying “here I am – the doer and author of the currently performed activity”, all the attention that just moments ago encompassed a good four hectares of activity suddenly contracts into that one tiny dot and sets off on our familiar fun daily thought roller coasters of “what if I’m not doing this well enough” and “what if nobody properly appreciates me for this”, instantly shattering unity into shards, taking from us peace, wisdom and the ability to make quick and correct decisions. Here the ability to exit the state that the ornate Carlos Castaneda once dubbed with an equally ornate name “the assemblage point of consciousness” is an indispensable medicine and tool against excessive stress and sadness.
- a very abstract translation from the words and their derivatives of other, unfriendly countries’ languages
