Why meditate?

Feeling our way into balance.

Maybe the point of meditation is to find a connection with reality just strong enough that we can hold it throughout the day, but light enough to not be held back by it.

I imagine one of those surfboards that can go on the water but also in the air, when there is enough momentum, and maybe the perfect way for our minds to operate is with just enough connection to the water to not fly away but also enough loft to experience that freedom from resistance. Not too up-in-the-air or “flighty,” and not too down in the water limiting, too stuck.

So maybe meditation is like learning to hold lightly onto that tender connection with the “water” of reality without slipping into the “air” of delusion. And if we can maintain that light grip throughout the day, we need not drift off into delusion and chase our thoughts the way the wind blows a piece of paper around – or get mired in the mud of rumination.

Maybe meditation puts us on a road that closely follows the ups and downs and turns, the old kind of road that surrenders to the land rather than re-forming it, that goes alongside creeks and past the shores of lakes and through groves of trees and out along cliff edges and over the tops of hills – not the kind of super-engineered expressways we build now, which ignore and even destroy the curves and swerves and subtleties of the land. Our modern mind-roads want to impose their own order onto things, ignore all the beauty along the way in order to speed more efficiently towards whatever destination we think we need to get to.

Maybe the point of meditation, then, is to slow down, roll down the windows, breathe in the air and smells, see the trees and hear the birds and the water, and yet still travel the road, only actually travel the road, connected, move on the ground rather than above it or through it. Once we feel the road, then perhaps we are more able to truly travel, rather than to pass through, and we can live our lives with that tender but true connection with everything around and within us – seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, knowing what is truly important, without clinging to it and getting stuck in it, like one of those surfers flying along while also just rippling through the surface of the water, connected to the surface and sky simultaneously, not affected by the wind or the waves, just riding both lightly.

What if we could live our whole lives that way?