Some mornings I get up with an idea in my head. The idea pursues me through my morning shower, my preparation for meditation, and buzzes around in my head distracting me while I am trying to be present in the now. It can hardly wait for me to finish meditating so it can pour itself out through my fingers into the keyboard and jump into WordPress to share itself out with everyone who happens across my blog. Ideas are full of themselves, convinced that they are important, that they must be shared with others, that others must pay attention to them. They demand to be the center of the universe.

Other mornings, the ideas are asleep. Thoughts dart into and out of my head: an upcoming birthday must be shopped for; holiday gifts picked up; meetings coming up at work that day; secret worries about my health, my future health, elderly relatives; how do I help my niece who wants to become a better speaker; how do I help my mom who is bored, my sister who is overwhelmed? They dart in and out, sometimes spinning themselves into short fantasies about how I start a speakers club for my niece or connect my mom to Storycorps.

I think about my friend who lives alone and, faced with the isolation of Covid, decided to go to Kenya to visit another friend of ours, a three-week vacation with safari, baby elephants, leopards. It was perfectly safe, she said, everyone in Kenya is masking and using hand-sanitizer compulsively and they take your temperature like four times a day. You can’t even enter the country without a negative test and – shocker – they actually check your test results unlike the US, who could care less. Each of us, right now, is living with different levels of comfort with the rest of the world.

But these thoughts, all of them, are fleeting, not enough to hang a blog on.

And some mornings, there are no deeper thoughts, no stories that share a deeper lesson. Some mornings, there is just getting up, moving through time, letting the shallow thoughts flick off into the ether.

So here it is: a blog post about nothing.

And yet I keep typing, why? Because I set myself a goal. Sometimes I hit this goal, sometimes I don’t, but it’s a goal so I try to keep my appointment with it, keep moving towards it. If I miss the goal one day, I note that I missed it, and I let that go, returning to the goal the next day as if I hadn’t missed it. The way that, when I am meditating and recognize that I am thinking about something, I recognize the fact and come back to focusing on my breath, on being here, now.

Practice.

Practice not being perfect. Not having something to say every day. Not feeling like you have to have something to say.

Not worrying that your brain has stopped working because you have nothing to say.

Not worrying that because you have nothing to say today, you will never have something to say again.

Life is transient.

All that I have and everyone that I love is of the nature of change.

I cannot escape their loss.

I came here empty-handed and will leave, empty-handed.