Silence is golden

I spent the day at a one-day Zen retreat. The schedule was curiously bottom-heavy. The first one-day sit I went to, in the winter of 2002, started at 5:00 a.m. and featured seven 40-minute meditation periods before lunch, five after lunch. Now the schedule starts at 6:00 and has four periods before lunch and five afterward. So what, you wonder. Just that it's nice to hit the halfway point of the day with more than half the work over with; and I was a little discombobulated. I never knew what was going to be next. Plus they actually juggled the schedule while the day was still going forward.

It was painful, all right, and I hardly got into what could be called a real meditative state at all during the day. Most of the time I was just remembering how to sit. I was bored. I was conscious of annoying the people on either side of me with my fidgeting. I even left early.

But when I got home, I was a lot calmer than I have been in recent weeks, and when Cris said she couldn't go to the symphony because she wasn't feeling well, I didn't make a fuss. I just drove to the symphony hall and returned the tix for a tax deductin, and then stopped by the video store for another Sopranos tape.