What’s a reason a person might meditate? To experience softening. But what is softening?

In meditation, there comes a time when the din of thought subsides, when the mind settles and becomes peaceful. In this state, the importance of getting your favorite parking spot or being the fastest runner up the hill become less intense. You’ve temporarily sanded off the hard edges of your worst qualities. Your world has softened.

When your anxiety has ebbed, you wonder to yourself what you were so worried about. Every emotion is transitory. In meditation, you exist in the mental space carved out when thought drops away. This objectivity allows for the realization that everything is okay as it is. When things are okay as they are, there isn’t anything to “get” from the world. Snagging your favorite parking spot goes from priority number one to a distant orbiting moon. And when this happens, you have tasted softening.

Follow the thread, and you might just trade partying on Saturday night for watching the evening light evolve as it’s thrown on your living room wall.