Meditations on Meditation 1/29/21

A couple weeks ago I was in a virtual meeting via Zoom. I was feeling a bit stressful when a friend of mine, Rena DeLevie, sent me an article she had written for HuffPost on the topic of meditation, a sort of how to guide that said to me, however you want to go about it, do it like that. I thought about how I used to do it on the Metro North Railroad, while wearing noise-cancelling headphones, how I would shut myself in a room at home and invariably end up falling asleep, or how I used to purloin one of the rooms set aside for lactating women at work so that I could have a 20 minute session when the need to meditate came on. The article gave me such a good laugh, I shared it with John and it became the inspiration for our three-part series on, you guessed it, meditation. Here is a link to Rena’s very funny guide to meditation:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-feisty-guide-to-meditat_b_9421350

This week you saw the final two installments of our three-part series. In part two Marv picks out a mantra, at Al’s urging. As the aforementioned article said, anything will work. Well, this actually pisses me off since my wife and I paid a small fortune to get our mantras “specially chosen for us” by some Maharishi named Katz at a Westchester Center for TM (don’t ask how much, ‘cause I’m not telling). In fact, and this may go into the category of TMI or Too Much Information (for you folks that hate acronyms) but I frequently push away thoughts of my next meal when meditating. So when the article mentioned tuna fish as a possible mantra, John and I just ran with it. By the way, I do recall my maharishi or guru (or whatever you call him) telling me NOT to meditate right after a meal. “It’s better to be alert,” he said. Well, I beg to differ, unless you want to keep muttering “guacamole” as you put myself into a restful state.

The third and final installment comes from the TM (that’s Transcendental Meditation for you acronym haters) teachings on meditation. They tell you to concentrate on clearing your mind by repeating your mantra softly, to yourself. If you said it out loud, people would likely think you were crazy for talking to yourself about suuuu-shi rollllls, or tuuuu-na or whatever it is you’ve chosen (see, I’m writing this around lunchtime and can’t help the damn food references). The trouble comes with the clearing your mind part. It’s like that old saying, try not to notice the elephant in the room. It’s all you can notice. Try not to think of anything else except your mantra, go ahead, I dare ‘ya. But eat first, trust me.

So that’s it for this week. Thanks as always for reading The New 60 and the blog and for passing it on to your friends. We will see you next week with two new ones and no, they will not be about meditation.

Andyyyyyyy and Johnnnnnnn

FRIENDS 1/22/21

I think as we get older, we get a bit more unfiltered. We don’t agree to as many things as we used to agree to and we don’t just go along for the sake of going along as much either. In other words, we become more cantankerous. Today’s first comic results from an inability to filter. And it comes from personal experience. Back when I was working in advertising, sometime in the 18th century, there was a woman who worked for me who used to regularly break down in tears or get worked up into hysterics, and, suddenly, she seemed noticeably calmer. I asked her what was different. She told me she had embarked on Transcendental Meditation and it had changed her life. She even showed me a secret hiding place to meditate during work hours. We worked in a huge NYC high rise on the 32nd floor, but right off the second floor, there was a secret side door just to the left of where the company cafeteria was located. There stood 7 rooms reserved for lactating mothers. At most one or two of these would be in use at a time. She would simply claim one, slide the in use tab outside the door, lock the door and sit in the easy chair with her eyes closed for 20 minutes. Heaven. When she exited, she was refreshed and ready to take on the rest of her day. And she didn’t even have to lactate. So I went to take a course in TM along with my wife and it was terrific. But, I’m ashamed to say, I took my colleague up on her secret the very day after my course had ended and used one of those 7 lactating rooms. Fortunately no one ever saw me exiting, because I had no idea what I might say. “No, you don’t understand, it’s not what it looks like…” But I digress. The funny thing is that after paying a semi-exorbitant amount for my wife and I to get our training and our own personal mantras, a friend pointed out that you could get mantras for free simply by going online. Way to harsh my mellow, dude. And if you want to know what that means in English, it means “way to ruin my peaceful mood.” And so was born today’s first comic.

Our second comic came from John enlisting his wife to hold up the big screen tv while he attempted to connect it to an extending, rotating arm he installed in the back of the wall. Note: this is a major difference between us, I just call the super (I believe it has something to do with growing up Jewish but I cannot prove it). So he wondered, what would happen if we tried to call our friends to help us with a physically demanding task? What would their excuse be if they no longer had to work? And this is where our age difference came into play (I am 5 years older than John). I wanted the excuses to be, “Oh I can’t, I’m having an endoscopy, while John was more in the “Oh I can’t, I’m taking the family on a ski trip,” vein. Since I can’t even draw a stick figure and since his version was more optimistic, guess who won. But in the words of the hit play Hamilton, I say to you John, “Just you wait!”

So that’s it for this week but we will be back next week with parts 2 and 3 of our meditation series. Try it, you’ll like it.

Have a great and safe weekend

Andy and John