Thursday, January 10, 2002

A friend of mine asked me if I'd like to join her for a meditation session. I, being of a person that does not do things requiring lots of concentration and persistance, told her as much and demured from the invitation. I know me. I can't meditate if my life depended on it.

Meditations requiring the clearing of one's mind; I can never do. The littlest sound distracts me. I know. I've tried it when I was about 15, I think. My mom dragged me along to the vihara/temple where they were offerring meditation classes. Try as I might, I keep hearing the sound of cars passing at a road nearby, the turning of the ceiling fan, a barking of a distant dog, the croaking of the frogs; everything except silence and the sound of my own breathing and only my breathing. That's what the instructor asked us to concentrate on. The sound of our own breathing. Out. In. Out. In.

I can't even do a simple thing like that. My brains kept going, 'Am I doing this right?', 'I should be thinking about anything, should I?', 'Shouldn't even be thinking about thinking right?'. Meditation's just not for me.

My friend however, delightedly informed me that this was not the sort of meditation we'd be doing during that session. Her type of meditation involves visualisation.

Another problem. I can only visualise given details of what I should be visualising on. Not just 'imagine a deer'. I would need at least info about the colour of the deer and it's size. How am I suppose to visualise without details. Oh sure, I'll get a general image of a deer but my mind would feel like something is missing.

Then she went, 'Oh, you must be more of an audio/sound person? or a feeling person.'

I've never really thought about what sort of person I am in this sense. Visual or audio? I think I'm more of a physical person. Movement. Touch. Using my hands and body. Using what I have. Yeah, that's it! I'm a physical person. That'll probably explain why I like dance and crafts.

In dance, you can feel it when you've done a particular step correctly. It just feels right, at least for me. When you do it wrongly, something just feels out of place. Y'know? It just doesn't flow. Doesn't move.

This probably also have something to do with me like being in control of things that I can control. One of the reasons why I'm a programmer. It's simple. For a programme, it's zero or one. True or false. Right or wrong. If a programme doesn't work, means there's something wrong with it and it can be fixed ... eventually.

Well, sort of. Doesn't work for Visual Basic though. Some events just fly from one to the other. I made an ActiveX control once, in VB, and it worked differently in different machines. Found out that in some of the machines, the event handling goes in different order. I don't know how to fix that. Doesn't make any sense to me and I didn't think it needs to be fixed as it was not due to my code (nothing's ever due to my codes ... hah!) Wonder if they're still debugging it.

I digressed didn't I?

Anyway, told her I'm not interested in meditation but she said she'll call anyway when the time comes. Just in case I've changed my mind by then.

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