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[ 5 minute read ]
The me I should be
Samadhi
Have you ever woken in a wondrous state, clinging to the tail of a wisp of a dream that elusively fades and dissipates even as you open your eyes further to try to keep it in view?
There was, what I thought, a hand from behind me, gently washing my right shoulder. I was naked, in the bath, and I wanted to say, Quickly! We are late!' But the hand did not move faster. There was no friction as a dry hand on dry skin would have. Instead it was slick against me.
It was a dream. But that wasn't 'the' dream. That was another dream that intersected me and 'the' dream. 'The' dream had a group of silky-white and partially translucent figures in it. I had been speaking to one of them while others milled around. There was no fear or anxiety; no jealousy or hatred; no love or kindness; just an existence that was peace.
The hand that gently rubbed my back wasn't washing me; it was waking me.
'Come away now.'
Yet, there was something else. The feeling of being late for something but needing to do something before I left our house. It was as though I was a teenage boy and my sister and I were about to get a lift to school from our mum. At least, the female voice shouting 'Hurry Up!' seemed to belong to someone older than the female who was saying, 'Come on!' There was a scene of organised chaos within a safe and easily recognised setting; one we have all experienced.
'I need to wash first.' I was saying. When I actually woke up I really did; need to wash that is; I stank. I had to check the weather forecast to see how much bedding I could dry outside today.
I woke with the 'silky white people'; the echo of discordant chaos in a rushed life, and the hand 'washing' me awake, all a-jumble; pricking my memory.
Like sitting alone on an empty beach on a chilly Summer morning, and watching the sun rise, I rose from my bed with a sense of peace that was interspersed with the stink of myself and the automated actions to make coffee. And just like being on the empty beach, alone, watching the sun rise on a chilly Summer morning, I knew that this was ephemeral; it was all in a state of flux. As fast as I tried to contain the scene and moment and make an attempt to freeze it, it had already changed. A sense of loss was mixed with a new wonder or less favourable discovery.
There was a word that kept floating on the periphery of my mind; 'samhedi'. Well, that was what I thought it was. I am familiar with French but was still surprised when an internet search gave me 'Saturday'. No, that isn't it, I thought.
Samadhi, in Indian religions, is regarded to be meditative absorption. Well, that pretty much covers watching the sun rise on an empty beach on a chilly Summer morning, I suppose.
The chaos of getting ready for school while a sibling is urging one on and a more strident voice of authority can be replayed endlessly to match every day of most of our lives in the Global North. It doesn't have to be school-kids or a sibling; it could be work and a partner before leaving the house; or a work colleague and a supervisor at work, a police officer guiding traffic, or a tutor. It is just daily life with others around and rules and conventions and someone urging us on for some reason that we really cannot understand beyond its superficiality; productivity, racing to catch a train, stirring a cup of tea too fast for all the liquid to stay in the cup just so we can catch the start of something in a different room. Just the pace of ordinary life.
I never get woken by a soft insistent stroke. I have no memory of a hand that did that. What has stayed with me is the idea that there was also a sentiment conveyed to me, as I woke that said, 'Come away. It is time to wake.' It is the same voice that woke me from my semi-conscious dream states on some days when I was less than eleven; before everything fell apart and I was left to try to assemble them by myself.
Just as the sun rises and everything changes, I cannot remember where the shades of colour were and all the other pieces belong; and just as people start walking their dogs on the beach and the air warms a little, there are more important and relevant things for me to attend to. I have to be able to ride today's roller-coaster to get to the end of it; only to find my jigsaw pieces on the beach scattered by the people and events of the day, even if I don't meet any of them, because many of them live on the beach, just as I do.
Somehow, I have to make the old and the new jigsaws into one, and that will be the living me. The me I should be.