Zenny

Everybody thinks Zenny finds it easy.

Zenny can sit perfectly still, like a little statue, and make a whole noisy room go quiet just by being in it. Fluffs come and sit near Zenny the way you sit near a fire.

What nobody knows is that Zenny gets distracted by every single sound.

Every one. A tap dripping. A bird. Somebody's shoe. Zenny's head is not naturally quiet at all; Zenny's head is a room with all the windows open.

On the day of the building works, it was unbearable. Bang. Scrape. BANG. Somebody's radio. Squirmy practising jumps directly overhead.

Zenny sat down to do the Statue Breath and got about four seconds in before the banging took the whole thing away. Then tried again. Then got cross, which is a spectacularly unhelpful thing to be when you are trying to be calm.

Tipsy came and sat down opposite.

"It's too loud," said Zenny. "I can't make it stop."

"No," said Tipsy. "You can't."

"Then how am I supposed to—"

"You're trying to make the room quiet," said Tipsy. "That was never the job. The job is to pick one thing and keep coming back to it."

"But I keep losing it."

"That is it," said Tipsy. "The coming back is the whole exercise. Every time you notice you've gone, that's one. You've just done a hundred of them and called it failing."

Zenny sat very still and picked one thing: the breath going in, and the breath going out.

Bang. Gone. Come back. Breath in, breath out.

Radio. Gone. Come back.

Squirmy, overhead, doing what sounded like fourteen jumps. Gone. Come back.

Five slow breaths took about four minutes instead of one, and Zenny came back perhaps thirty times.

And at the end of it, Zenny was calm, in a room that was still extremely loud.

That was the day Zenny actually understood it, and it is why fluffs feel better sitting near Zenny.

Zenny is not somebody whose head is quiet. Zenny is somebody who has practised coming back.