On Sitting Still
The best thing I’ve come to know is how much I don’t (and won’t ever) know
At my alma mater—a tiny college in northeastern Florida you’ve never heard of—there is no official philosophy major. Instead, the program I tacked onto my primary concentration in English literature was called Philosophy & Religion.
Course offerings were so few and the cohort so small that we shared almost all our classes each semester. Every room was bifurcated: half of us were involved in Campus Ministry and half of us were seeking something beyond God—or at least the Judeo-Christian God of our upbringings.
For the first two years I was in the program, there was only one full-time philosophy professor. And although he wasn’t religious, he was—in the verbiage I used at the time—floaty. He stacked the semester with courses like Metaphysics and Taoism—courses I was obligated to take if I wanted to graduate on time. On his office door, he’d taped a piece of printer paper which offered, without context, that quote from Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
After sitting through yet another lecture on anima and animus, I riffed in my notebook on a joke I’d heard among STEM students: In physics, if you don’t know the answer, it’s probably friction; in this man’s class, if you don’t know the answer, it’s probably the collective unconscious.
I was fresh out of six years of Catholic school—seventh and eighth grade plus all of high school—and my elementary years had been in the Lutheran tradition, which I’d come to call Catholicism lite.
While my parents had not been particularly religious, they’d sent me to parochial school—an improvement, they thought, over the public education available in South Florida at the time. Possibly it was. But my early exposure to religion also drove an existential crisis when, as a teenager, I lost the faith I’d been indoctrinated into since I was five.
By the time I was a philosophy major, I was a 23-year-old, black-eyeliner-wearing Richard Dawkins stan. I wanted to read Nietzsche because he’d said “God is dead.” When our professor asked us to seriously consider dualism or pushed us on the hard problem of consciousness, I rolled my eyes. There was no problem—at least not one that had not already been solved by the invention of the fMRI machine.
We took Taoism during a summer semester: two-hour blocks, two days a week. Our teacher was glad to have so much time, he told us; we’d be using it for experiential practice. That is, we’d be sitting meditation—starting with ten minutes and gradually expanding to twenty-five minutes per class. First, though, we’d practice horse stance in order to stimulate our flow of chi—or imagine the snake of kundalini coiled at the base of our spines, ready to slither up to our crown chakras if we achieved a certain ineffable level of concentration.
I sat there with my eyes closed, seething, I tried to calculate the number of tuition dollars I was spending—my parents were spending—for each minute I breathed in silence, wasting irretrievable time.
After our professor rang the bell—a mercy—he asked if anyone wanted to share about their meditation experience. Another young woman in the class shot her hand into the air.
“It was incredible,” she said. “It was like I saw another realm behind my eyes—it was so colorful, almost sparkling.”
“Yes, that can happen,” said my professor, his voice without affect. “But keep going. There’s more beyond the spectacle.”
It was all I could do not to audibly groan.
My teacher knew I was the token materialist of the group. I didn’t make a secret of it. In Metaphysics, I regularly shot my own hand into the air, making quips about molecules or matter.
At some point, during an office visit, he looked me in the eye. I forget his words, but his meaning was clear—and infuriating.
It’s okay that this is where you are for now. The truth will find you when you’re ready.
All of this flitted in an instant through my mind as, a few weeks ago (and twelve years later), I checked myself into a silent meditation retreat in Southwest Washington. I strongarmed my very own cushion up the muddy hill to the hall during a merciful lapse in rainfall.
I joked that I was doing it backwards, attending a meditation retreat only after flying to a foreign country to do ayahuasca. But frankly, the idea of sitting in silence for three days—without my cell phone or even a book to keep me company—scared me far more than drinking a powerful hallucinogen in the jungle.
Obviously, some things had already changed by the time I arrived at the retreat center.
The years since I graduated college were stacked with multiple cross-country moves and new loves and their resultant heartbreaks and the death of my father—and, yes, a later-in-life psychedelic awakening with its own colorful, sparkling realms. In the time that separated 25 and 35, I’d gazed into portals that had changed me, had peeled me back to layers of awareness I simply couldn’t have understood before I got to them.
Indeed—there are more things in heaven and earth than I’d dreamt of in my jaded, brand-new-adult philosophy. The best thing I’ve come to know in my 30s is exactly how much I don’t (and won’t ever) know.
Still, I arrived at the retreat a requisite ball of anxiety and intensity. I was stepping out of a typical American life of fast habit: immediate responses to text messages; stacked-up calendar days; color-coded spreadsheets. I kept one eye glued to my digital to-do-list—which included the daily directive to sit for Ten quiet minutes ✅. I did try most days, but usually got up after just five or six. After all, there was still so much more to do, and the bulk of my energy was bent around doing—or more specifically, getting done.
At a meditation retreat, though, there’s almost nothing to do—which, as it turns out, is a lot. After the first night’s sessions—just a few hours—I already noticed my shoulders aching. I thought of the long days lying ahead, nothing to fill them but the sounds of breathing. The thought that occurred to me is the same one I have most times I sit down to a new piece of writing: How am I going to do this? Why do I do this?
Lying in the twin-sized bed, my cell phone switched off and locked in my car at the bottom of the hill, I tossed and turned. After an hour, I got up to take a Valium. I knew it was the only way I would get any sleep.
But midway through the next morning, something in me broke open—as if it had been waiting to. As if it had needed only the barest touch.
It’s hard to decide the details that matter: drinking evening tea in the dining hall with no distractions; sharing silent space with other adults, none of us slumped forward into our phones; the deeper recognition that can be offered when there’s no expectation of talking—how much can be communicated in mere eye contact.
The way in which I could see my own bullshit in such stark relief, and so quickly.
During one session, a man—hulking and handsome, all crew cut and jawbone—started sobbing. Sitting on the island of my own cushion just a few feet behind him, I watched my impulse to run to the lobby and fetch him a box of tissues rise and fall. In stillness, I saw at once how little the urge actually had to do with comforting the man—and how much it had to do with being the one to do the comforting.
Wow-yikes-thank you, I thought, in quick succession. Then I let it all go and kept sitting.
Meditation is in no way at odds with a materialistc worldview. And there are plenty of secular Buddhists, though a rich cosmology—including heavenly and profane rebirths—is available for those who subscribe.
Still, I do know my 20-something self would scoff at the person I’ve become. Even in the present tense, I feel a little obnoxious, like an exchange student who gets off their return flight waxing lyrical: I came home from the three-night retreat an instant, just-add-water vegetarian; I sticker-stuck the Pāli word for suffering, dukkha, on the back of my phone. I guard my sitting time with the same intensity I guard my creative writing—and like creative writing, meditation’s no longer on my to-do list. Like brushing my teeth or walking the dog, it’s just something I know I have to do.
I don’t get up before the timer anymore. And yet, I somehow find that the longer I sit, the more space I seem to have in the day for everything else.
It’s okay, I would tell my 20-something self if she were here, that this is where you are for now.
The truth will find you when you’re ready.