I bought a pair of used paddle boards from a wealthy suburbanite whose house was a three-minute walk from a lake. “We just don’t use them.” Did he prefer to speed through thrashing wind on waterskis, or sit on an Adirondack chair, hand loose around a dripping gin and tonic? Either way, or neither, the boards now belong to me, who used to say “Boring!” about the people surfing the surface ripples, slow, silent, standing…
I’ve discovered I was wrong, because whether something’s boring or brilliant depends on your stance.
Paddle boarding on a quiet lake is like walking in the woods without a path. You can meander, drift, close your eyes for a minute and feel all the sensations shunted to background by privileged vision rise to the fore—the sun’s heat toasting the left side of my body, especially my ear, the plash of paddles and twitter of swallows and even their zoom through air as they swoop out from the shadow under the bridge and circle each other, voices laughing and calling out from the beaches on either side, the wind-up inevitability of a toddler’s cry, an insistent drumbeat coming from … somewhere … and bouncing off the rocks on the far side. Murmurs, splashes, whirring traffic far off. It’s leisurely and peaceful.
Every so often in his guided meditations, Sam Harris will ask if there’s a “stance” in the mind. What he means is to notice whether we have an attitude toward this meditation session—wanting something to happen, expecting certain feelings or even a state. Wanting… expecting… both of which will invite disappointment; it’s in their nature.
I find myself applying this question to life, throughout the day: What is my stance, right now? Usually, I’m leaning toward something, some desired outcome, hard, tilting into the wind, holding balance against the current. A stance is attitudinal. Analyze it, and you’ll find that it comes down to liking or not liking, wanting or not wanting, desiring or resisting. I imagine if I were actually flowing with the current, or even floating or drifting, as soon as I noticed, I’d try to right myself into a stance. This is the automaticity of the default mode network, always filling in the structure with sense-making cognitions.
Taking a stance in the mind is of course related to the deluded quest for stability and permanence, the wish to stop the shifting beneath our feet and free ourselves from the fear of floundering. It’s difficult not to take a stance, just as it’s difficult to grasp that circumstances are in large part created by our stances. A circumstance is literally everything around a stance that influences or is influenced by the stance.
My challenge, then, is to see all circumstances as shaped in part by my stance—my stance toward life at the moment. When I feel trapped and hemmed in on all sides, rather than running away and ripping through all the circumstances, leaving everything in tatters behind me, I can check my stance: Is it defensive? Is it a crouch? How can it loosen? What if, as when I’m on the paddle board, I give my whole frame a shake, ripple out the stiffness while holding a delicate balance on the watery world? What if I just lie down, so my circumstances become open, unending air, where clouds aren’t obstructions but prisms?