Notes from Bergen 2: Walking Meditation and Gershwin

The “ion” trailing at the end of the word “meditation” reveals buried movement in usually concrete and restful nouns. Like “locomotion” or “concentration” or “constipation” or “friction” or even the simple “action,” the word “meditation” conveys fragile, balletic flow, conveys just how difficult it is to be without thinking.

Meditation challenges me. I’m busy-minded at the best of times, fragmented and reactive and playing whack-a-mole with pop-up thoughts like a three year old on a venti caramel frappuccino at the worst. 

But I’ve become interested in the quiet spread of mindfulness discussions all around me. Like the slow food movement, mindfulness is more than just a catch phrase: it’s a reaction to the  asteroids of information hurtling at us from all directions all the time.

My friend Ben recommended “Fully Present: the Science Art and Practice of Mindfulness” by Smalley and Winston of UCLA, and I’ve been working my way through it.

But it’s hard. Two five minute bursts of meditation after the first cup of coffee and before I wake the kids for breakfast will make a huge difference in the quality of my day, but more often than I care to admit I’ll glance at my phone and fall down the rabbit hole.

Right now, Kathi is away at a conference in Copenhagen so I’ve been soloing with the kids in Bergen. It’s dreadful here right now: one veteran ex-pat, Michelle, said, “you’re in the trough” yesterday. Every day has a handful of minutes clipped off either end, so sunrise happens after 9:30am and darkness sweeps back before 3:30pm. Around Christmas the days will begin to inch longer again.

So no mediation for me this morning. I got H and W up, fed and ready for school, then walked W, my 9 year old, the 20 minutes it takes to get from our place to his school over by the university in the pitch black, rainy, cold.

We made good time, and after a kiss goodbye (I treasure these kisses because I know they’ll disappear one day) I left him running around the back alley that serves for a playground in the dark with his buddies.

As I popped my hood up against the rain, I remembered that Smalley and Winston talk about walking as a good opportunity for meditation, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Wow. It’s not easy.

The human mind is a recognition-making machine. In response to any stimulus, we humans try to stuff it into an existing conceptual box. Social psychologists call this habit of our being cognitive misers. So walking through a small city like Bergen is an exercise in recognition rather than simply seeing… particularly when one is also trying to avoid getting hit by the lightrail.

So I focused on breathing. That helped. A song from “The Muppet Movie” (the kids and I watched it on Netflix last night) kept rolling through my head. I thought about putting my ear buds in with music, but that would have defeated part of the openness… so instead I tried to switch the soundtrack in my head. First, I imagined Rodrigo’s “Concierto for the Aranjuez,” but that didn’t work. Kermit kept interrupting. Darned frog.

I walked, feeling the monkey mind leap from building to billboard to bus, pulling me away from the unmediated experience of the cold air coming into my nostrils, the rain patting on my hood, the sound of water running through the gutters and plopping out of the way as my boots stomped through puddles.

The monkey mind — the one playing whack a mole — is in a tense tango with mindfulness.

Some Norwegians might have enjoyed doubts about my sanity, seeing me stand motionless in the middle of a plaza, eyes closed, quietly coaxing myself back into a flow state where I saw the lights on the giant Christmas tree on Torgallmennigen Street sway in the slow breeze, rather than simply walk by with “Christmas Tree, check” as the only notice I would take of the tree today.

I found myself looking up at the top floors of buildings, where I noticed odd arrows pointing my gaze several windows to the right for no apparent reason.

But the muppets wouldn’t stop singing.

Casting my mind through my mental musical database for something stronger than Kermit and Miss Piggy but that would still let me experience my surroundings, I hit upon “Rhapsody in Blue,” George Gershwin’s acoustic valentine to the sounds of New York City waking up and getting on with its day.

I know the piece as well as any non-musician can, and sound I found myself hearing the yawn and stretch of Manhattan overlaid on the traffic and splashes of Bergen.

I stopped again at the Fish Market, standing silent next to the street and heard Gershwin on the piano in my mind accompany the rumble of people dragging wheeled luggage across cobblestones, the water rushing down the street as I left the Fish Market and climbed up into the Bryggen hills where the house it. 

Still dark, I came in, put my earbuds in and had Spotify stream “Rhapsody in Blue” while I poured coffee, booted the computer and sat down to write this post.  Spotify started with Leonard Bernstein, cycled through Gershwin himself on the piano, and is now back to Bernstein.

Meditating in a dark room, sitting upright on the couch, with something like this playing on Spotify is much easier, but I like the challenge of walking meditation. Perhaps it will be different by daylight.

It is now dawn. Time for more coffee and the rest of the day.

Thanks for reading.

Oh, and if you want to know which song from the 1979 Muppet Movie was playing in my head, you can listen to it on Spotify here


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1 response to “Notes from Bergen 2: Walking Meditation and Gershwin”

  1. Roberta ( Rita) Berens Avatar
    Roberta ( Rita) Berens

    Loved the imagery.

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