On Losing Interest, and Coming Back

There wasn’t a single day I decided to stop. That’s what made it hard to notice, and harder to fix once I did. I missed one morning because I was running late, told myself I’d do a longer sit the next day to make up for it, and then the next day didn’t happen either. By the time I actually counted, it had been almost two months since I’d sat down for longer than it takes to find my phone charger.

What surprised me wasn’t the gap. It was the shame that filled it. I found myself avoiding the draft folder for this very site, half-convinced that having a page called “Practice” while not practicing made me a fraud in some specific, embarrassing way. I’d catch myself explaining the site to people in past tense, like a hobby I used to have, which was a strange thing to do about something I’d started twenty months earlier and genuinely still believed in.

What actually broke the freeze wasn’t a plan. I was bored on a train, no particular resolve involved, and sat for about two minutes with my eyes closed, no timer, no ceremony, nothing to write down afterward. It didn’t feel like a comeback. It felt like nothing, which in retrospect was exactly why it worked — there was no standard to fall short of.

The version of me that skipped two months and the version writing this now are the same person. Impermanence cuts both ways — the discipline was never as solid as I thought, but neither was the failure.

The shame, I’ve come to think, was doing more damage than the actual gap in sitting ever did. Two months off a cushion is just two months. Two months of quietly deciding you’re the kind of person who can’t stick to things is a much longer sentence, and one I handed myself for free.

I’m not back to sitting every day. Some weeks it’s four days, some it’s two. I’m trying to let showing up imperfectly count as the actual practice, instead of something to apologize for once I’ve earned my way back to a streak worth mentioning.