Time Management Tuesday: The Fourth And Last Week Of Developing Discipline With Meditation

I've seen a little bit around the Internet lately about writers feeling pressure to write faster and more. Meditation, I suspect, is just not about speed. I've already used the watched-pot-never-boils metaphor/cliche in relation to meditation. If it is going to improve concentration and discipline, meditation should help us stay on task with work and manage time better. Yeah, maybe we'll be able to work faster. But how quickly is that going to happen?

Here's a little tale I may have told here before but not in relation to meditation. It may illustrate how meditation works:

Eleven years ago, I started training in taekwondo. After a few weeks of hating class and only sticking with it because I'd paid for three months and I was too cheap to leave that money on the table, endorphins started kicking in and I was totally into the other-world experience I was living during my hours in the dojang. I was into it.

I found an old beat up book on martial arts in my local library. This is one of those mystical book type deals where you are probably the first person in years to touch a volume on a shelf, and it has something just for you. The book has been waiting for you. In this case, what the book had for me was the advice that I should train for the sake of training. I totally got that. I didn't know anything about rank advancement when I started. I never cared about it. I just liked to train. My only goal was to have my dobak clean for the next class.

The martial art experience was so huge to me that I believed something from it would surely extend into other aspects of my life. My work, for instance. Something good was going to happen with how I worked because I was doing taekwondo. I kept waiting and waiting. What would it be?

A couple of years ago, I realized that I was writing for the sake of writing. I wasn't selling anything anymore. Blog readership and feedback and dropped dramatically. I wasn't getting any of the traditional rewards people get from their work. I was simply working for the sake of the work, just as I trained for the sake of training. And I had been doing it for a while. I just hadn't noticed. It had become part of my work life without me being aware of it. No bells and whistles or releasing of balloons.

My point? I suspect something similar will happen with meditation. If I am able to keep up the practice, at some point I will notice an impact on my work, probably one I don't expect and can't predict. It will be something that will have become part of my work life without me being aware of it. No bells and whistles or releasing of balloons.

Actually, that's kind of exciting. What will it be?