Final work - Meditating while writing

Meditation opens one’s own inner room and creates an awareness for oneself existing and thoughts and feelings also existing in this space. At some point one realizes thoughts and feelings are just like clouds – not permanent. One can sit and watch them pass by.

When I started my bachelor’s degree, I was able to move out of my small suburban town after a year of studying. I had found a stable job at a museum in the marketing department and therefore could afford to pay my deposit and a monthly rent. From then on, I worked two to three days a week besides taking classes. I felt very strong, independent, productive and self-reliable. Also, I saw university as my second “job”. Though, I always found some lectures and other events, dealing with different topics than our curriculum, that I liked – I was still just thinking about passing exams and writing my essays in a way that I would get a good grade. After studying two years in this way, I went to Istanbul. Suddenly, I didn’t have to have a job due to the Erasmus grant, Auslandsbafög and an increasingly diverging exchange rate between Euro and Lira. Also, I had basically almost fulfilled all my modules so I didn’t have to take as many classes (which I could mostly follow through the power point presentations since I just started learning Turkish). 

Anyway, I am mentioning all of this because really, my life and everyone’s life is constructed so much by circumstances that can be very rationally traced back to living in a capitalist world. All my diary entries from the first weeks of spare time in Istanbul circle around what to do with so much time and money and that I could eat out now for every meal. In this capitalist world there are things for which there’s time for and there are things for which there’s no time for. There are thoughts for which there’s a garden and there a thought for which there’s no garden. And there is big interest in a lot of gardens never blooming. 

I made one friend in that year; he wrote poetry. I had a lot of free time and needed to somehow structure it: so, I went running at Modal Sahil a lot and did yoga. I always told him, that even though I feel like living in a strange vacuum – because I didn’t really understand Turkish, and had no job, and had no people around me that knew me longer than two months, I felt so calm and could find some inner space. He always told me: “I know what you mean. I don’t exercise but I find this room when writing poetry.”

Three years later, taking this class, this statement is filled with a different meaning to me. I could find my own inner room that opens while writing. Answering the questions, I found myself many times, directly starting a second paragraph and observing my own behavior when answering the actual question. Sure, I learned something from preparing the assignments, but I am learning something long-awaited from reading my second paragraphs. 

Now, I am grounded and heart warmed from reading my own writing, reading these lines. Back then, entering back into the real world where you have to make money and meet expectations for credit points to do internships for no money, I really wasn’t.