the old spiritual equation
Once, I might have boiled my beliefs about spiritual life down to a simple equation:
MEDITATE MORE = BETTER LIFE
Meditating more was easy enough to quantify. If a 30-minute period was good, surely a 35-minute one was better. If one period a day was good, why not two? Why not three?
And why not, indeed, if MEDITATE MORE was in direct relationship to having a BETTER LIFE!
Better life, of course, was more difficult to quantify. Less anxiety, maybe. More small moments of joy. Connectedness. Insight.
To be honest, during this period of my life, I didn't spend much time carefully defining what a better life might look like for me. I had the general sense it might be more grounded and easeful. But mostly I believed in the equation, although I never expressed the equation to myself in such direct terms. It was one of those invisible frameworks that dictated my life. I figured I didn't need to think much about exactly what a better life would look like, because if I meditated more, I'd be certain to get there and find out.
Did the equation hold? It did and it didn't. It's hard to imagine what that period of my life would have looked like if I hadn't been getting up early most days and spending long chunks of my weekends at the Zen center. I'd imagine it would have been easier in some ways and harder in others.
What I'm interested in, though, is the equation. No one ever wrote out this equation for me, nor did I ever think of it that way for myself at the time. Yet it was there, deeply ingrained, and it shaped my choices. It created a container that reshaped that period of my life, the same way water forms to the container it's poured into. All without me seeing the container at all.
I came to the rosary, and to WOTR, after leaving that container.
I thought I'd left that invisible equation behind too, but... If a 5-decade rosary each day is good, wouldn't doing all 15 decades daily be better? If one rosary circle a week is good, shouldn't I squeeze in two or three instead?
But instead of shutting my eyes tight and doubling down on that left side of the equation, MORE, the rosary offered me the opportunity to look at the other side: What did a better life actually look like for me? What did I truly desire?
These questions let the rigidity of the unseen equation melt away. Like plants overgrowing a crumbling building, the wildness of my life was able to return. I relearned trust in the ground beneath my feet.
I chose today to write a post because my son is a year and a day old today. My son who I thought I would never have the opportunity to meet in this lifetime.
When he arrived, I was birthed into a different life, with different rhythms and cycles, different priorities, different relationships to time, to night and day, to future and past. To creativity. To work. To others.
I'm still sifting through it all, still sitting in the fresh wild overgrown garden and seeing what patterns I might notice.
I'm glad I threw out the equation. I pray the rosary less often than I used to. I come to circles less often than I used to. But I carry my beads with me. I say a few Aves every day. I pop in when I can. There is still that thread of connection, now winding into a different shape.
If I still thought that MORE = BETTER, I might feel bad, I might force too much in, I might miss entirely what is before me in this moment of my life.