I seem to have become meditation

Barring the occasional insight that strikes me in the client situation, I have no ideas. I’ve recently discovered this: My old ideas were just ego-clingers, or a desire to have a theme. But I’ve now seen that none of them can be valid. Look at some ideas that are nonsense: Life is nasty, brutish and short. Life is beautiful. People are good. I’m in love with love. Service to country is noble. Service to family is admirable. I am important. Liberty is right. Life is an adventure. Children are our hope. God exists and is moral. Each of these ideas can be found to have exceptions or to be unjustifiable.

I’ve also discovered that I can’t accept any identity feelings. I am not too much of any one: sad, content, happy, loving, wistful, angry, pathetic, anxious, afraid. They swirl in and out, like a liquid kaleidoscope.

And yet, there is a primary substrate of myself. It is a loneliness that started with birth and removal to an incubator and to a depressed mother, and that has always been the underlying axiom. Though needfully married, there is always a silent room between us. Sometimes the room is very thin. I have never in five decades sat in on an employee lunch or birthday party. I walk the dog at night, a car’s headlights approach from the distance, and I am angry. My two friends are states and many decades away. All my coworkers and neighbors are ships passing in the night. I’d say that is a feeling, but I’d be chary of calling it my identity.

So the upshot is that I am meditation incarnate. When I walk, or sometimes at the computer, there are no thoughts and no stories of mood, only the kaleidoscope, only silence. I have no ambition, which would be a sort of energy, but to do what I do.

An odd thing happens, though, sometimes. Thoughtless, and no spiritual goal in mind, I will press a couple of leaves on a bush, or touch one of the big rocks that are made into walls throughout my apartment complex. This gives me an odd feeling of reality, and the lightest possible feeling of affection, for lack of a better word. I don’t dare pollute that goodness with a thought. The phenomenon is the child that remains: He was once nothing but connection, or nothing but the need for it. Through neurosis and years, my eyes have become too distanced from things. But touch breaks through. If I had more ego or anxiety, I could turn that into a “truth,” a meaning. But there’s no reason to.