Information from the outside, memories of the outside, associations and thoughts can all be floating around in my head. When I write "outside", I mean the world, both the nearby world of my house and neighborhood and the solar system and the rest of the physical world. My senses include what I see and hear but also tastes and smells and the feel of surfaces. Those physical senses let me know what's going on, to some extent, even though I can't see some things that exist, like the wi-fi waves that are traveling through the house right now. Memories spring up all the time. We drove from The Inn at the River to Stevens Point this morning. When I look at the street out the window just now, I remember how the roads looked on that drive.
We were concerned about road conditions. In Wisconsin at this time of year, it is only sensible to be on the lookout for weather-related problems.
Associations are tricky. I am prompted by thoughts of road conditions to think of road conditions I like and those that I don't. I see unbidden pictures of giant road chains on giant 18-wheelers' giant tires. Part of me associates the title of the book by Jon Kabat-Zinn with what I have been writing about. The book is "Coming to Our Senses". I have heard of that book and I suspect I would live better and more fully if I paid better attention to my senses. Did I ever buy that book? Do I already have it in my Kindle library? [Looked it up and yes, I do have it. Must read it!]
It might be getting older, it might be meditation practices, it might be something else or some combination, but I feel more interest, even a little hunger for meditation. I was proud of seeing how to enrich my life in just five or ten minutes a day. I looked down on the idea of sitting in meditation for an hour or hours of several days running. But lately, my senses, my memories, my associations and my thoughts have seemed richer, deeper, more interesting, more satisfying. I can see more value in extended meditation time.
I have been fooling around with focused attention in a meditative way since about 1980. I thought I was doing that to increase my awareness of what I was thinking about. If I was obsessing about my hair or my weight, I wanted to notice that I was obsessing and about what. But now it seems that I actually produce a wider range of sensory observations, memories, associations and thoughts about all of them than I used to. I have also been aware that I am more in the mood to talk to myself than I used to be. I can quickly question sensory impressions. Vocalizing questions or comments to myself, even in complete silence, seems to pull in a wider range of reactions, questions, realizations.
