A Strange Little Meditation

A Strange Little Meditation

I have started handwriting notes while reading Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality.

This is apparently what I do for relaxation.

I wake up, make coffee, climb back into bed with a notebook and one of the more notoriously difficult philosophy books ever written, and feel my nervous system settle.

I’ve realized there is a reason.

For a little while, my mind is occupied by something other than caregiving.

Actual entities.

Prehensions.

Nexus.

Creativity.

The many and the one.

Concrescence.

These words require enough of me that there isn’t much room left for:

What does Dad need today?

Is he anxious?

Do I need to arrange something?

Did I choose the right caregiver?

What needs fixing?

What happens next?

This morning, however, the two worlds collided.

Yesterday we had a terrible experience with a new caregiver.

While it was actually happening, something unexpected occurred.

I found it funny.

My dad was there. My son and husband were filled in later. The situation became increasingly absurd, and we laughed.

It was genuinely a bad experience.

It was also comical.

Both were true.

Later I began analyzing it.

I needed to contact the company. I needed to document what happened. I needed to determine whether this could work and how to prevent the same thing from happening again.

All reasonable things.

But somewhere in that process I crossed an invisible line.

I wasn’t simply dealing with what had happened anymore.

I was experiencing what might happen next.

What if they send someone like this again?

What if bringing in caregivers creates more work for me rather than less?

What if this isn’t sustainable?

What do I need to do to make sure this never happens again?

By bedtime I had a surge of adrenaline. I could feel my brain continuing to organize, anticipate and solve long after there was anything immediately in front of me to solve.

The caregiver had gone home hours earlier.

My body apparently hadn’t.

And then this morning I was sitting in bed studying Whitehead.

“The many become one, and are increased by one.”

Suddenly yesterday looked different.

The actual event had happened and become part of the past.

Then I took pieces of that past into another moment.

I selected certain pieces more strongly than others: the problem, the risk, the possibility of repetition, the need to prevent it.

And those pieces participated in creating an entirely new experience.

The caregiver wasn’t creating my adrenaline at bedtime.

She wasn’t there.

The analysis of what had happened—and my anticipation of what could happen—had become part of a new present experience.

That doesn’t mean the analysis was unnecessary.

This distinction matters to me.

Planning is useful.

Discernment is useful.

Recognizing that something isn’t working is useful.

But the analysis of an experience is not the experience itself.

And sometimes I think I remain inside the analysis so long that I don’t notice I’ve begun creating an experience of a future that hasn’t happened.

Then I looked at my notebook.

I had been using music to understand Whitehead.

A chord can be analyzed into individual notes, frequencies and vibrations. All of that information is real.

But none of it replaces hearing the chord.

I had also written about painting.

I could scrape pigment from one of my paintings and send it to a laboratory. Someone could tell me exactly what chemicals were present.

They would know something true about the painting.

But they wouldn’t know the painting.

The living whole contains something that cannot be exhausted by dissecting its components.

And I wondered whether this is sometimes true of a life.

Perhaps I don’t always need to understand every component of an experience while I am living it.

Perhaps sometimes I can hear the chord.

See the painting.

Laugh at the absurd caregiver.

Drink the coffee.

Read the impossible philosopher.

Let this particular moment become what it is.

There will be time to analyze some of it afterward.

And perhaps there will also be a time to stop.

This morning I realized that Whitehead has somehow become a meditation for me.

Not because he empties my mind.

Quite the opposite.

He gives my mind something vast enough to inhabit.

And for a little while, instead of trying to manage everything that might happen next, I find myself fascinated by the strange fact that anything is happening at all.