Hanging with the Elephant by Michael Harding

sent outnew shoots and now a new daughter tree stood beautifully bare, beside the old stump and against the backdrop of the lake. I didn’t hug it, but I certainly curled the flat of my two hands around the bark of the young sapling and offered her a few words of encouragement. And that’s when I saw the badger track. The pathway had reappeared, exactly as it had been twenty years ago, a zigzag line through the long grass, the heather, the rushes and even through the fence. Mr Badger or his grandchildren now moved across the earth on the same lines as they had done for generations, long before the upheavals that had befallen them during the time of the boom and the diggers in Mr Quinn’s quarry.
    It took a lot of effort to get the badgers out of my mind and to start focusing on my breath again, but the next thing that distracted me was the banjo, because I couldn’t ignore it in the corner of my eye. It had been lying neglected in its case beside the computer desk for months. I don’t play the banjo. But the musician in Mullingar who gave me the walking stick also gave me the banjo for my sixtieth birthday.
    Perhaps I ought to have taken it up and played something. I could pluck out ‘Amazing Grace’ and the ‘Leitrim Jig’. I could play three chords – G, D and C – which I’d downloaded onto my iPhone the day after my birthday, so I wanted to quench the candle and pick up the instrument. I guessed that most people would find strumming a musical instrument far more soothing for themind than trying to focus on a spot at the end of their nose. My nose as it happened.
    But I decided to persevere. I banished the banjo and began to focus once again on my breath. Breathing in and breathing out. I took a quick glance at the little plastic clock on the bookcase. I had begun at 11 a.m. and figured it might now be near midday, and I wanted to get a Scollan’s lunch before 1 p.m. because all the school students come then and create a bottleneck queue for lasagne. But the clock said it was only 11.10.
    The reason why my guru once told me that the mind is like an elephant was to explain how very hard it is to discipline the mind. Even with strong ropes, it’s not very easy to keep an elephant still. It will go where it wants unless it is trained. But beginning again to think of the mind as an elephant was making me tense.
I can’t win here
, I told myself. If my mind was a horse, I wouldn’t be able to control it. An elephant is way beyond me. It’s ridiculous. Why bother at all?
    I was now fighting myself. It’s a terrible twist that I get into sometimes when I’m trying to meditate. I’m sitting there as still as a statue of the Buddha but inside it’s mad. It’s a war zone of rage. I’m flitting through all the people I loathe. All the reasons I should loathe myself. It’s like a therapy group in my head but everyone has gone berserk and is talking at the same time. I end up more stressed out than when I first began. And though I was still sitting onthe cushion, my hands joined in my lap and my eyes to the ground, I was contorted in fury, and full of frustrated desires to scream or kick the cat or just shoot someone.
    And maybe that’s why my mind eventually drifted to Afghanistan again. Or maybe it was because of the documentary that had surfaced in my BBC podcasts the previous day as I was driving home.
    A soldier had been talking about his tour of Helmand province.
    ‘We were driving over a ridge,’ he’d said, ‘and we came under fire. There were Taliban trenches all around us, which the Taliban had left half an hour earlier, and now we were in them and they were firing at us.’
    He’d said he liked techno music and that when he was preparing for a tour of duty he made playlists for his iPod. He used dance music for physical exercising and country and western music to put him to sleep at night when he was lying in some half-dug grave under the Afghan sky, but when he was in battle, he found techno