Welch: Meditation, mysticism, Sudoku, Facebook reels

Give up one addiction, and another will move in.

Giving up Sudoku wasn’t easy. I’ve been free and clean for a couple of months now.

Those attention-grabbing reels that pop up on Facebook are my latest temptation. I’ve quit clicking.

So far today I’ve not watched a runaway truck take an uphill escape ramp or chickens move around on a lawn in spherical cages or somebody’s cat eat for the first time from a cardboard bowl. Life is hard.

But when you eliminate time-wasting habits, you can at least feel smug — unless you give your Higher Power credit instead. Either way, you’ve got reason to smile.

A friend of mine has all but given up Facebook. Her house is clean. She gets things done. She goes to her grandchildren’s track meets. She doesn’t play Candy Crush. She doesn’t always know everything that’s going on in the lives of her friends.

Me, if I give up the FB habit, it probably won’t mean I’ll become a good housekeeper. It’s like the guy who got treated for broken fingers and asked the doctor if he’d be able to play the piano.

I’d finish that joke, but you already know the punch line.

Indeed, the idea of regaining the time I lose perusing Facebook does hold a certain appeal. I could practice my sax instead. Or my fiddle.

The other people in the doctor’s waiting room might not be amused.

The last time I was there, absolutely no reading material existed except for some sort of health poster on the wall. Remember when an array of magazines was the norm? Now virtually everyone has a phone in hand. Unless overcome by chills and fever, each person is looking at a phone screen, staying in touch with whatever and whoever.

Me, I used to play Sudoku.

Now I’m thinking I’d do better to pray. Or meditate. Except I don’t know how to meditate. I’m pretty sure you have to get off your phone.

At one point in my life, mysticism (cousin to meditation) held an attraction for me. I tried to get a handle on it because the topic of my never-did-get-written master’s thesis was an artist who painted as if he might be a mystic.

Two of my friends back then, one older and one my age, purported to have had mystic experiences. The younger one was driving on an isolated rural road and was taken to a higher level of consciousness simply by sensory boredom. Yes, while driving.

The other described her mystic experience — feeling at one with the world— as it occurred when she was walking back to her humble hotel room and seeing all the men standing in soup lines in Chicago during the Great Depression.

RESEARCH PAUSE.

I was wrong. You can get a smartphone meditation app.

Maybe I’ll install one of the free ones and get hooked.

Will I need a mantra?

I’m thinking, No Sudoku. No Sudoku. No Sudoku. …

Hanaba Munn Welch sums up her weekly thoughts in exactly 501 words and dashes, a tribute to the old Fort Worth & Denver steam locomotive Engine 501 or Levi’s jeans. Take your pick. Farm life often inspires her writing.

This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Welch: Meditation, mysticism, Sudoku, Facebook reels