I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing right now. I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, I think, because report­ing fail­ure is never that cheery a prospect. And my “month of desire” — to analyse, work with and per­haps help myself over­come my grasp­ing at food, at con­sumer good, at any­thing — failed.

Not only did it fail, but it failed quite spec­tac­u­larly, with me overeat­ing like a par­tic­u­larly hun­gry ghost, and even giv­ing up med­i­ta­tion for a cou­ple of weeks.

And this is where I would prob­a­bly, in the past, have given up. And sunk back into despair.

But not this time. I have, instead, bought a cou­ple of par­tic­u­larly good-looking books on overeat­ing. I’ve also bought and have been lis­ten­ing to (I bought the audio ver­sion) Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, to get some inspiration.

(Don’t fear, gen­tle reader, I know Zen is not about read­ing books. To para­phrase the emi­nent Mer­lin Mann, read­ing a book about Zen is like buy­ing a chair about jog­ging. But I’m hop­ing to find some point­ers in the right direc­tion, at least.)

And I plan on pick­ing myself up after this fail­ure, and get­ting back on with things. Because I think that this fail­ure may be part of the process. I’m def­i­nitely feel­ing dif­fer­ent things as a result even of fail­ing to let go of my desires. And I’ve been more emo­tional recently, which I think is a good sign of change.

So, I’m going to read these books, and try to get to the bot­tom of my desires, and specif­i­cally my prob­lems with overeat­ing and other addic­tions. Partly I’m going to try it through thought, and partly I’m going to med­i­tate. Because sim­ple daily med­i­ta­tion did seem to be tak­ing me in a good direc­tion in my life, and I don’t want to lose that.

The first thing I’ve found to use as inspi­ra­tion are these words from Zen mas­ter Hiakajo, quoted by Alan Watts:

“When hun­gry, eat, when tired, sleep”

That’s a def­i­n­i­tion of Zen. And it’s two areas I’ve been hav­ing such a prob­lem with all my life — for decades, at least — that it really hit home when I heard it. It sounds so sim­ple. And yet it feels so, so dif­fi­cult to do, for me. Even the sleep­ing, but espe­cially the eating.

But I’m going to bear those words in mine. And start­ing tomor­row (I’m too tired today, and it’s gone 10pm, so I’m going to head for bed right now) I’m back on the med­i­ta­tion, and I’m going to focus on sim­ple eat­ing and sleep­ing, and get­ting them right. Because I think those two key areas could specif­i­cally help me lead a more mind­ful life than any­thing else I can think of.

See you tomorrow.