LauraPratt33's blog

Dr. Kiran Bedi is an Indian social activist, a retired Indian police officer, the former inspector general of one of the largest prisons in the world and the glowing subject of a documentary film I saw last night at the Runnymede Library.

"Doing Time Doing Vipassana" is a dramatic account of Bedi's efforts to deliver a certain measure of psychological serenity to the inmates of the Tihar Jail, a sprawling complex west of New Delhi. As those who have worked with her expound enthusiastically in the film, Bedi was remarkable for the way she insisted that prisoners are deserving of the same respect as everyone else.

Things are crappy right now and everybody knows it.

The world's economy is coming apart like a flaky pastry and there ain't a baker in the place with a recipe for repair.

News report after news report clocks in with the latest devastation: every day there are more job losses, more company shutdowns, more bankruptcy announcements, more destitute souls.

I was thinking today, as I was rounding one of the heartbreaking early corners in my nightly running course, how meditation is not always a static enterprise.

Indeed, I would venture that I do some of my finest meditating in the rarified air above a pair of well-worn New Balance running shoes pounding the pavement. The enforced thinking periods my regular perambulations permit are a gift for someone like me, for whom "quiet time" is a compound concept of equally unlikely probability.

Remember those funny little ant houses that were among the requisite booty of childhood? Remember peering into the glass enclosure and watching the insane industry of those tireless bugs, seeing the way they endlessly carted leaf shards across the landscape, stopping not a moment to bust the breeze with fellow shard carters, but furiously working to meet some unseen insect-imposed deadline?

That's me. That is my brain.

This is my brain on meditation.

Yesterday, a friend of mine died. I have known Linda for 14 years. I know all about Linda, and the secrets of her life. My inbox is filled with her e-mail. I have never met Linda. Now I never will.

So I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room yesterday, stroking my son's sallow cheeks, fuming over all manner of bureaucratic inefficiencies, raging against the particular tumbling of events that has brought us to this place, when I notice a man beside me in a pool of serenity.

The thing about me is this: I have a hard time controlling my own mind. That sounds ridiculous, I know. Who else has control of her mind, after all, if not the person providing the comfortable, well-appointed skull that contains it? I remember being quite haunted by this reality when I was a kid. I remember letting wicked, terrible thoughts creep into my brain (my parents dying if I didn't clean the kitchen; the house burning down if I was careless with money; fiercely believing that just because I thought something was true, it must be), and then freaking out at my apparent inability to keep a lid on my world.