when i cannot sit still

Some days I sit and the sitting does not land. It is not that I am bored, although I have been bored sitting, and I have been bored sitting while pretending I was practicing. This is different. The body will not accept the chair. Every minute is a small negotiation with my left knee, or the place between my shoulder blades, or a muscle in my face that I did not know had opinions.

For a long time I treated these as failures. A real practitioner would sit through. A real practitioner would watch the restlessness without moving. A real practitioner, I read somewhere, would meet the restlessness with loving attention.

I do not believe this anymore. Or rather, I believe it, but I believe it describes one kind of practice and not the only one. There is another practice, which is the practice of noticing that the sitting is not landing, and getting up.

What I do on those days is not complicated. I stand up. I walk around the house once. I drink water. I come back. Sometimes I try again and it lands. Sometimes I do not try again and the day is over and the practice that was available to me that day was the walk around the house.

The trick, if there is one, is to stand up without calling it a defeat. The trick is to walk around the house the way you would walk around the house on a day when you had not tried to sit. If you can do that, the walking becomes something, and the day has not been lost, and the chair is not a judge. The chair is just a chair. You will be back.