There’s a good chance that peo­ple who think about Bud­dhism a lot have already thought of this, but I was med­i­tat­ing the other night while my mind was run­ning wild, and I was look­ing for an image to focus on, to help me clear my mind to fall asleep. I thought of a still pond, the pond I imag­ined while I was read­ing Thoreau’s Walden. For a moment, it was this still and tran­quil scene, serene in silence and motion.

But the activ­ity of my mind quickly over­came it. A slight driz­zle dropped on to the pond, caus­ing small rip­ples in the water. I tried to keep it still and focus on that image, that still image of that still pond, but doing so only made it rain harder. I would yell in my mind, stop! but it would only make the rip­ples big­ger. Some­times I could con­trol it for a sec­ond, but it seemed the longer I could hold the image, the stronger my mind’s defi­ance, bring­ing hail, falling trees, and other kinds of earthly chaos. I man­aged to hold the image in my mind for a good quar­ter minute only to see the pond, and every­thing else around it, dashed away by a good sized mete­orite, appar­ently unre­ported by U.S. satellites.

I since attempted the same exper­i­ment, and depend­ing on my mood, have found it to be more or less dif­fi­cult. The one con­stant is that every time I attempt it, my breath­ing stead­ies, my mind clears, and I feel bet­ter. But only after a few brief moments of plan­e­tary destruction.