On Enlightenment - Part III

Meditation. Panic. Raindrops. Nabokov. A four-part series, 12/3/2024 - 12/6/2024.

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This happened so long ago now, my twenty-two-year-old daughter hadn’t been born yet, if such a time was possible. I was with my wife and two-year-old son. The three of us had taken a walk in a park near our house. We’d been out trudging through damp Seattle woods, chatting, stepping up and around fallen trees. This was during my first year of daily meditation. I hadn’t yet depleted my store of beginner’s mind. I carried high hopes for the coming enlightenment – all that.

Some of you will understand the idea of walking as meditation. This is, critically, the intentional, focused way I plan to walk to Finisterre—when pain, boredom, and the bottomless need for approval and attention don’t get the better of me.¹ When you walk as a meditation, what you do, you do with attention, you do with care, you do with intention. What you say, you say thoughtfully, but without making all of this obvious to anyone, at least as I understan…