Nobody does emotive better than Merlin Mann. When he really feels something, you do too. Even if you don't understand the issue, you get the feel of it. And until just now, his Clackity Noise post was one I felt more than I understood.

After all (to borrow a Merlinism) isn't it terribly reductive to sieve the meaning of writing into the mere physical act of typing? The physical act of hitting keys on a keyboard is the least important part! Merlin knows better, so why would he focus on the clackity noise?

How To Sit

That was four years ago. My subconscious can be fast if it wants to, but it takes its sweet time before it gets its hands around some ideas. The cattle prod on my subconscious was a luxurious resort on the impossibly beautiful Turks and Caicos island. It was an opportunity to read books that hang around on a well-intentioned list. This one was called How To Sit. Even if I find much of Buddhist philosophy to be kind of nutty, I can always enjoy a good sit.

What I learned is that meditation is not about sitting. Well, it's all about sitting, and not about sitting at all. Damn, I've just become that guy.

It's really about meditation. And meditation is a great way to clear your mind. But your mind doesn't stay empty; your subconscious will fill it right back up again. With meditation, you can clear the accidental and unimportant, and let your subconscious process the meaningful and important.

Buddhism has been teaching meditation for millennia, and it's learned a thing or two. While I'm no expert, I gleaned some things. First, it's intimidating to have a two step process that says:

1. Sit down.
2. Achieve enlightenment.

So instead, it teaches you a step-by-step method that you can actually achieve. You can sit. You can get comfortable. You can pay attention to your breathing. You can repeat a phrase that stresses the act of relaxing.

You don't need a step that says to let your subconscious fill your mind in with what's really bugging you. That will happen anyway. You need steps to allow you to continue to push things from your conscious mind over and over until the subconscious offers up something worth thinking about. And then you'll think about it anyway. No steps needed for that.

So what Buddhism figured out is to drop the intimidating or automatic mental processes, and describe the physical and the approachable parts. If you do enough sitting, and enough mind-clearing, you will eventually focus on the important.

Sitting on a white sand beach, occasionally watching the repetitive azure ocean lap, this made a lot of sense. A calm beach is practically an invitation to meditation all on its own. It reminded me that I already had a kind of introspection process of my own, similar to meditation but not quite.

Watching Ink Dry

I keep an occasional journal with fountain pens. But I don't just write after I've figured out what to write. I often write in order to figure out what to write. I fold over a crisp new page, pick up a wide-nibbed pen with a juicy blue ink, and start writing.

I like to watch the ink dry. Fountain pen ink is water-based, and when it flows well, goes on wet. It sits on the surface of the paper for a few seconds, reflecting a sheen like wet paint. After you're a word or two on, the ink sinks into the paper, getting absorbed into the fibres, losing the sheen and becoming permanent. Sometimes I write a stream of consciousness, just to watch the ink dry as I write past. And before you know it, the words become meaningful.

It's the same principle. Forget the pressure to introspect on something critically important. Just write whatever comes to mind and follow the beautiful sheen on the page.

Enlightenment

It's astonishing to me how you can't skip steps in life. How you can't take perfectly good advice to avoid a broken leg until you've already broken it. And how I couldn't have come to an understanding about what Merlin was going on about until I'd had a good stretch of not knowing what he was going on about. About how I couldn't understand meditation's focus on sitting until I'd already found a similar principle by watching ink dry.

So it's always a cycle where I start by not understanding and even turning up my nose at someone's nuttiness. But in time I generally end up seeing where they were coming from. It doesn't always mean agreement — just because you can see the path someone took through the forest doesn't mean it was the smartest path, but at least you have some idea what they've been through.

I'm still looking for more methods to achieve introspection. Just to write this, I had to sit for a time to think. I watched some ink dry in my journal while many of the words found their way onto a page. And finally, I had to make the keys clack until these electrons were all aligned properly. Maybe I'll take a literal walk in the forest later. I don't yet have a path in mind.