I have been using my phone to set a timer for my daily meditating, but it occurred to me recently that a stick of incense would be the better choice, so as of tomorrow I will be using only the incense to guide me temporally in my meditations.
The reasons for this are plenty, and I will attempt to non-exhaustively list them here.
The most basic reason is that I strive to meditate roughly 45 minutes at a time and a stick of Satya Sai Baba incense takes slightly more time than than to burn to completion in my apartment. But just as I am moved by external factors, the time the incense takes to burn is influenced by things such as the air current and the relative humidity within my apartment. I appreciate that this is a measure of time that is not constrained by the clock, so to speak.
Another important reason is that I do not wish for my phone to be involved in the meditation process… at all. My phone plays a significant and pervasive roll in my life as it is. My meditating will benefit from its being detached from my phone completely. I will thereby benefit from a phoneless meditation, I suspect. I’d like to elaborate on this further but I suspect doing so right now would take this post into the realm of lexical abstractions that would just derail the basic premise of the piece. So I won’t do that.
Finally, utilizing a stick of incense as my meditation timer will encourage me to be more aware of the visual aspect of the stick of incense, whereas before my relation to it while meditating has been solely a relatively passive acknowledgment of the pleasant scent wafting through the air in my apartment. Again, I will avoid elaborating too much on why I believe this will be impactful, but I have more than an ounce of faith that it will make a difference for me.
After completion of my meditation today, I decided to put on a new instrumental album released by Thurston Moore, the former member of Sonic Youth. The album is called Screen Time and is available to stream for free or to purchase on Moore’s Bandcamp page. It’s a beautiful collection of songs, and is proving to be perfect for both my post-meditation vibes and the process of writing this post.