Meditation Is Maintenance
- Dima Apelbaum
- Mar 17
- 2 min read
Meditation.
Who came up with this nonsense idea
that you have to sit down
and listen to yourself?
It sounds like punishment.
First, you have to sit in school
and listen to the teacher
and now do it voluntarily,
to yourself?
That’s what I thought in my late teens.
One of the unexpected benefits
of growing up behind the Soviet iron curtain,
protected from spiritual teaching.
Have I changed my opinion?
Not entirely.
I still believe that a person
living in their natural state
doesn’t need to meditate intentionally.
Natural state is peace.
Equanimity and Joy.
I’ve touched it.
In movement.
In flow.
In those moments when the body
is so fully occupied
that the noise simply
stops.
You know the feeling.
When you’re so inside what you’re doing
that there’s no one left to worry.
That’s it.
That’s the state.
So why meditate at all?
Because we don’t live there continuously.
Nobody I’ve met does.
Life accumulates.
Stress layers on stress.
Old reactions crust over fresh experience.
You start moving
but you’re carrying last week,
last year,
an argument you never finished,
a fear you never named.
That’s where sitting came in for me.
Not as a spiritual practice.
Not as a belief system.
As maintenance.
The same way you mobilise a stiff joint
not because the joint is broken
but because life compressed it
and it needs space returned to it.
you sit because the mind has compressed too.
Debris accumulates.
Old patterns calcify.
You think you’re responding to now
but you’re actually responding to then.
Meditation isn’t about becoming spiritual.
It’s about becoming better.
Better mood.
Better breath.
Better clarity.
The same way good training
stops being about lifting more weight
and starts being about moving better,
you sharpen the blade.
You take care of the weapon.
You might never need it.
You might never use it in the way you imagined.
But a sharp blade
and a dull blade
are not the same life.
So I sit.
Reluctantly some mornings.
Imperfectly always.
Not to become spiritual.
Not to transcend anything.
You sit so that when you stand,
you are sharper.
More present.
More dangerous.
Not because sitting is the point
but because natural state doesn’t wait for you
to be ready.
You have to clear the road back to it.
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