Gazing Out a Window

My living room, before the great window.

The heat from the tea penetrates the heavy ceramic mug and into my hands. Steam floats before my face as I gaze out the window, thinking about nothing, feeling everything, and then my concentration breaks for an instant as I’m reminded of the cookies.

I can’t count the number of places I’ve sat gazing out windows with a cup of tea in my hand while allowing imagination to run wild for a time before reining it in to a focused meditation. Many scooter and motorcycle rides lead to such a place as have walks and journeys by cars and planes. As much as I want to say I have some calling to introspection, it’s the cookie that brings me back, over and over again, to a quiet place where a conversation with life is possible. The cookie – meditation fuel.

Heart of the Matter

Post-heart attack I wondered if all snacks and comfort food would by necessity vanish from life as a hard, plain diet slowly strangled me. Perusing nutritional information on packages of sweet, chocolate goodness yielded the same message – “No snacks for you!”.

And then, unexpected, appeared Chips Ahoy Chunky Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Dry, hard, crunchy cookies with fat content lower than their compatriots, a package of reasonable fat and carbohydrate matrices that I could live with – literally – by my estimation.

The cookie is a talisman, a reminder of life lived simply. My focus with the Vespa follows that path. Surely the same is possible with a snack. There’s no need to eat the entire package, half or even a quarter. The path begins at three small round morsels imbued with the sweetness of life and ends with one solitary cookie – the grail at the end of a quest where body and mind meet in recognition that where cookies are concerned – less is more.

Problems with this ritual? What if I need to meditate twice in one day? How much fuel do I need?