Meditation: a written or spoken discourse expressing considered thoughts on a subject.
Some folks say mediation is better described as chewing cud. In a spiritual context, we bring up Scriptures and chew over and over again, making sense of them in our life context.
The prolific songwriter Neil Sedaka writes ferociously hard-to-forget melodies. He is also capable of turning out novelette-length inane lyrics— “where is he going with this hot mess?”
Too many words, too many thoughts, too much brain noise are the enemies of meditation. In the car today, a scripture song smothered me, verses tumbling out too many words for meditation. There was no time to slow down and sort them out. No pause, no refrain, no chance to consolidate noteworthy insights.
In short, not a chance for meditation.
Meditation filters out extraneous noise, letting significance rise to the fore and draining off the rest. It takes slowing way down. It takes parsing a phrase or a word and shelving the rest for the moment.
Without sleep, the brain cannot process life’s quick parade of daily happenings. Without meditation, we cannot understand which of these life events are really significant, and why.
Like an unforgettable refrain in a song, meditation consolidates and plays the life-defining stuff back to us, a sound track that keeps our lives on track.