I saw an advertisement last week for a "Meditation Cushion." (I wonder what else these eyes will see more) It was round, filled with organic buckwheat hulls, and cost eighty euros. Eighty euros to sit on the floor. My bank account, which is currently recovering from luxury cat food, felted birds, and thrift shopping. So, my current balance laughed at the concept. "You cannot buy enlightenment," it whispered, "especially not with shipping fees." So, I decided to improvise.

I grabbed a throw cushion from the sofa, the one that has lost all structural integrity, and threw it in the centre of the living room. "This is fine," I told myself. "True spirituality is about making do." I sat down. My knees cracked like a stick. The cushion immediately flattened into a sad pancake, offering zero support.

I closed my eyes. "Okay," I told my brain. "Enough thinking. Just be." For exactly four seconds, I was a vessel of pure consciousness. Then, the narration started. "My knee hurts. Is that a siren or the wind? Did I reply to that email from Tuesday? I wonder if penguins have knees. I should check if penguins have knees. Don't check. Clear your mind. Visualise a river. The river is full of penguins. They definitely have knees." 

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The French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously wrote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

It is a profound statement. It is also easy to say when you are a 17th-century genius and not a modern human sitting on a flattened cushion trying to ignore a cramp in your left glute.

We are terrified of the silence. We fill our ears with podcasts, our eyes with screens, and our mouths with conversation, all to avoid the terrifying prospect of being left alone with our own thoughts. And now that I am actually sitting here, trying to be alone with them, I understand why.

But when the external noise stops, the internal bureaucrat wakes up. This part of the brain does not want to achieve peace; it wants to review the files. It wants to conduct a line-by-line review of every social error, fashion mistake, and professional inadequacy I have accrued.

And when I am silent and alone, my thoughts are not profound. I am thinking about a haircut I got in 2018 that made me look like a mushroom. I am replaying the precise millisecond where my professor looked at me and said, "I hope I didn't cause you much trouble inviting you here," and I responded with a gracious, "Oh, please!" only to realise she was actually speaking to another distinguished professor standing directly behind me in the room. 

There was actually a kind of silence that settled in the room that Pascal would appreciate.

The irony, of course, is that trying to stop thinking is, in itself, a form of thinking. I am aggressively trying to relax. I am monitoring my own breath like a micromanaging boss. "Inhale... hold... exhale... Good job, lungs. Now do it again, but more spiritually this time."

This is the trap of modern Mindfulness. We have turned "doing nothing" into a performance metric. I found myself wondering if I was meditating better than other people. Was my posture straighter? Was my emptiness emptier?

I had turned the act of surrendering the ego into an exercise in boosting the ego. I was trying to win the Olympics of Doing Nothing, seated on a polyester lump.  

In the brochures, meditation always involves a peaceful animal sleeping by your side. My cat did not get the brochure. She walked into the room, saw me sitting on the floor, her domain, and interpreted this not as a spiritual practice, but as an act of aggression. To her, a human at eye level is not a seeker of truth. It is a wrestling opponent.

She didn't curl up. She approached my defenceless, cross-legged form with dilated eyes. Then, she bit my toe. It wasn't a love bite. It was a "get out of my swamp" bite. I tried to maintain my Zen. "I am a mountain," I thought. "I am unmovable."

The mountain was then slapped in the face by a paw with claws slightly extended.

She was bored and held me personally responsible for the lack of excitement in the universe. She climbed onto my shoulders, not to cuddle, but to use my head as a vantage point to look for spiders. There is no Mushin ("No Mind") here. There is only Chaos. She was effectively shouting, "Why are you sitting still? The economy is collapsing, and you are breathing deeply? Pathetic." 

I gave up. I peeled the cat off my shoulder, got off the sad cushion, and admitted defeat. I went to the kitchen. There were dishes in the sink. I turned on the water. I picked up a sponge. I washed a plate. Then a cup. Then a fork. The water was warm. The soap smelled like lemon.

The rhythm of scrubbing was repetitive and dull. And suddenly, I realised it. My brain had stopped talking. I wasn't thinking about the email. I wasn't thinking about penguin knees. I was just washing the fork. The silence I had been chasing on the floor had arrived, uninvited, while I was doing chores. It turns out you cannot chase "enough thinking." You cannot hunt it down. You have to bore it to death.

I finished the dishes. I felt calm. I looked into the living room. The cat was now destroying the throw cushion, bunny-kicking it into oblivion with pure, unadulterated joy. She had found her nirvana. I had found my clean fork. "Good enough," I whispered. 

See you next time. Keep doing (or not doing), 

Asena

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things I read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click 'Read More' to explore more.

I started Alex Schulman’s Station Malma, and honestly, it treats memory like a regional train station during a strike. Everyone is delayed, the coffee is cold, and nobody is quite sure which platform they’re supposed to be on. I still haven't reached the part marked "Emotional Resolution," but I’m taking my time. I am trying to finish a book about loss, too quickly and aggressively, and I am like sprinting through a graveyard.

I watched Aki Kaurismäki’s Tavern Man. If you haven't seen it, the dialogue is basically a specialised dialect of silence, cigarette smoke, and pauses so long you start to wonder if your Wi-Fi cut out.

Every character has this look, like disappointment isn't just a bad day for them, but a full-time career with a decent pension plan. They don't just "sit" in a bar; they inhabit the space with the kind of heavy stillness you usually only see in ancient geology.

But I loved it!

I also encountered two photographs that read more like visual jokes, with serious expressions: one of Giacometti sprinting past tall, exhausted sculptures, and another of two classical busts installed in an attic window, apparently hired as unpaid neighbourhood surveillance, with a special interest in pigeons and passersby.

None of these experiences were connected, yet my brain, desperate for a narrative, filed them under the same category: things that are technically still but emotionally very busy. By the end of the week, I had not achieved wisdom, closure, or inner peace, but I had curated a modest exhibition of delayed endings, frozen figures, and professional-looking observers, all of them pretending to be profound while mostly just standing there.

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