Daniel Lindenberger

On a day that has been thoroughly filled with an assortment of Awesome, it's funny at first glance that the highlight was locking my keys in my car.

After a morning's silent meditation and a beautiful and inspiring talk with my friend and colleague Kathie Wallace (introducing her to the Life Balance Lotus website and getting her insights on it), I was en route home when I decided I should stop off at the bank to make a deposit. On my way back to the car, I patted the pocket my keys usually live in... then the next, and the next.

Running back to the car, I had mildly alarming visions of it being gone. On realizing that I had locked the keys in the car, I had about five seconds of frustration:

- How am I going to get my keys out?
- How could I have been so stupid?
- How late am I going to be home?

Then the frustration and fear drained away. Things would work out fine, and there was no reason to let it spoil my mood. Now, this is the sort of thing that I might often intellectually realize, but it was a wonderful feeling having that realization permeate my whole being. At this point, I was mainly pleased that I wasn't letting it get to me too much. I wandered down the street looking for a phone to call BCAA from, eventually finding one and being told they'd have someone out in about half an hour.

Back at my car I sat on the trunk, and just... was.

Things have been great lately - lots of fun projects on the go, and exciting changes in my life. While I'm loving it, it means I've been keeping myself incredibly busy lately, often falling into bed exhausted from a day filled with a mixture of juggling different projects or "down time", resting. Too many of my hours are spent in front of this laptop, co-ordinating, writing, programming or otherwise engaged.

It was a beautiful gift to have a half hour with nothing to do but sit out in the sun on Fraser (my old stomping grounds), and watch the world go by. Sitting, focused on my breath, I started to go through Patanjali's Sutras (as you can tell from my other recent blogs, I'm thinking about them a fair amount recently, and working on re-memorizing and exploring them), and an idea began growing in my head around the eighth aphorism, on "Wrong Knowledge". Over the next while it crystallized into some ideas on epistemology that I'm pretty excited to write about (I'll give a sketch of it in an upcoming blog). 

Rather than diving into that idea here, I want to focus on how vital it was to have some unstructured downtime that was spent simply sitting and being. Not watching TV, hanging out with friends, or doing any of the host of things I usually do when I have some time to myself. Just sitting and being. 

It was a great reminder that my best and most profound work is done from that still place, and that taking time to smell the flowers - or even the exhaust on Fraser - is an extremely powerful way to let the creative juices flow.

My hope is that I can hang on to that realization, so that I don't have to wait until I next strand myself somewhere to simply hang out.