It’s well past bedtime. Most of the water that was in the bath is now on the bathroom floor. Both kids are still sitting in an empty tub, delighted. All I want in the world is for them to be asleep and no longer my problem, like yesterday if possible. “My kingdom for sleeping children!”
Earlier that day they’d been punching, scratching and yelling in the back of the car, driven insane by hunger. Who forgot to pack enough car snacks, I wonder?
Did I wobble? You bet. Did I lose it? No, and moments like these are why I practise meditation.
Little people or no, life throws things at you. And what I want isn’t freedom from any of it, running away and hiding somewhere quieter. It’s the ability to be in it and not lose myself.
The thing is our culture treats peace as coming after hard times. You get through the difficult bit, then you breathe out, then you come back. I don’t see it that way. I say peace and presence are the necessary foundation for doing hard work and getting through hard times. The more mayhem you’re in, the more peace you need. Not afterwards, but during it.
Besides, if peace relied on your life looking a certain way, no adult on earth would ever have any. There is always a demand, always someone wanting something, always someone in a bit of trouble. That’s not your life going wrong, that’s just life, right?
Know that when you can’t switch off, when everything feels like too much, when the reactivity is bubbling right there … that isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. You’re running on empty, cut off from what would actually fill you. And you cannot fix empty by getting better at managing or out-waiting the noise.
How do you fill up? What’s underneath the noise of the mind and life? Well, I can’t really describe it. Every attempt comes out smaller than the thing itself.
But you already know its absence. Empty is the bathroom pool turning you into someone you don’t really like. Not empty is the same late night flood, but you’re still there.
There’s a deeper current within you, always. Always you, always here. This means peace and presence aren’t things you create. They’re what being in contact with this deeper part of you feels like. It doesn’t need the circumstances to be right. But it takes the right practice for it to come forward.
Peace isn’t the prize for finishing your life. It’s the foundation you do best from. It’s also what you actually remember about life: not the tidy evenings, but the ones you were really and truly and fully in. Not avoidance, but aliveness.
What do you reckon? Tell me something about your version of the bedtime flood.
I like hearing back, if you feel like telling me.