The Perfect Machine

Photo by madison lavern on Unsplash

Yesterday I went to a spinning class. Nothing exceptional besides not having done any exercise for almost two months. First, the Christmas celebrations, followed by this year’s flu which knocked me down for almost two weeks. At the end of the class, I wished the session had been a bit longer. In forty-five minutes I’d been reacquainted with parts of my body I’d forgotten.

On the second day of the flu I tried to meditate. I’d accepted a friend’s invitation to join an online twenty-one-day meditation group which I’d accepted. For three weeks, every evening she’d be sending us a task and an audio for the following day.

Meditation is a simple physical task. You just need to sit cross-legged and pause. That’s when the problems arise. The enemies of meditation are mainly intellectual. Boredom, hyperstimulation, a vast prairie of nothingness... Since I practise regularly, I’m used to those baddies. In fact, I admire their determination to distract me.

That day, they weren’t the problem though. My body was. I couldn’t last more than a minute. How much weight our backs support! Much more than we think, I realised. I couldn’t cope with it, the effort and the pain, so I took a chair to listen to the audio. With the idea of reflecting on this experience in the future, I clumsily jotted down on a notebook the mantra for that day: ‘I behold all the abundance that surrounds me.’

Most machines cease working when a piece doesn’t function. But our bodies are so intelligent that they prioritise the energy and effort for those parts and circumstances in which they need extra care. 

The abundance, I learnt, is mostly inside us.