Bath Tub Adventures:From Insomnia to World Travel

Not being able to sleep tonight, I decided to run myself a bath in hope it might relax me. In general this works for me, yet it took a little while before I could drag myself out of bed to do it. It is a similar experience to being cold when half asleep and the blanket is out of reach. You curl yourself up tighter and tighter and linger between being asleep and awake, sometimes for hours, rather than stirring yourself enough to get the blanket and be done with it. After some bargaining, I was finally able to get myself up and moving.

As hoped, the bath was very relaxing. I was able to manage some success at my own, unskilled form of meditation and soon was at the edge of sleep. As I pulled the stopper, I found myself losing touch with my peaceful state and so turned my attention to the water draining in order to ground myself in the experience of the present. In watching the water swirl at the drain and feeling it slide so gently away from me I began to think of what is was like to be the water. I became aware of the drastic and sudden shifts that this tub full of water had gone through and would undergo in a very short period of time. I started where my awareness of my own journey with this water began, resting so quietly and peacefully, snuggled together in the tub. And now, on such short notice and without consultation, I had pulled the plug and the water had no choice, through the force of gravity, but to leave. Watching the little water funnel that was forming at the drain, I wondered if the water was fighting to stay in the tub. I pictured the next phase of it's journey, which was a free fall down a dark an dirty pipe and into the city sewer. This was all quite horrifying to me and and not very relaxing so I asked myself, "is a different way I can look at this?"

In so asking, I remembered a time when I described to a dear friend the lesson that I had learned while trying to save a bug from getting caught in my shower water and being washed down the drain. As the bug tried to walk up and away from the droplets of water, I attempted to shield him until he could get to a safe place. Repeatedly, he would reach a place that, if it would just be still, would suffice. But, repeatedly, the bug's anxiety got the better of him and he would move his legs around frantically, trying to get to even safer ground. The bug was too frightened, and could not be still. Eventually, he danced and squirmed himself into a flow of water that was just too strong and it swept him down the drain. In telling my friend this lesson about stillness and my sorrow about not being able to save the bug (silly I know, but at times these things trouble me deeply) her eyes watered and she pointed out what a beautiful gift the bug had given me. She expressed her gratitude to the mystical forces in life that are able to give a bugs life meaning and create a value from it's death, by placing a man there as a witness who, simply by witnessing, learns the lesson of stillness.

Recounting the power of this experience, I decided that this is the way I would view the water as it left down the drain. I would see the water with gratitude and and attempt to find a new understanding of the water's purpose and path. This brought my focus to the larger picture. It drew my thinking both backward and forward in time simultaneously. I was now aware of the the water before it came into the bath as it warmed in my hot water heater while at the same time being aware of its path down the drain and it's eventual journey to the ocean. This water, with which I just shared this space had, only hours ago, been who knows where sharing space with who knows who. Over the course of just a few days it will run through pipes, roll down rivers, fall into the ocean, crash in it's waves, be sucked up into the sky, travel in a cloud, rain back down on the earth hundreds maybe thousands of miles away, gather in a reservoir or someones swimming pool or...you can see the endless possibilities.

When told in the form of thoughts, and using only words to tell it, it is complex and would take pages, no volumes to describe. But, as an experience, it was almost instantaneous. It was when I got to what should be the more disturbing thoughts that I had my epiphany. It was when I got to the part where this water gets dirtied and purified over an over again through washing bodies and sliding through sewers and being drank down and peed out, that it struck me, I am made up of 75% water. This is not water that I am born with and stays in my body throughout my life. This is the water that travels the world and makes up 75% of other people and cascades down immense waterfalls and baptizes babies. Seventy-five percent of ME will be somewhere else in only a matter of days. This means that I am, in fact, connected to everything. And, while my conscious mind and non liquid matter stays in one place longer and doesn't experience the drastic changes that the liquid part of me does, the majority of me is actually departing for and returning from amazing, horrifying, exhilarating world wide travels almost constantly. As exciting as this was to discover, I was mostly grateful that my conscious self could go and tuck itself comfortably in bed while parts of my liquid self would be in the not so glamorous portion of its never ceasing adventure.