When I first learned to meditate, my anxiety surprised me. I began with short, five-minute guided meditations, so I thought it would be easy to sit with myself. One time when I was at the cinema, quietly waiting for the film to start, I opened my phone and a meditation began to play. The teacher’s voice floated in the cavernous room as, embarrassed, I fumbled to shut it off. That’s how meditation felt at the beginning, as though I was loudly in the wrong place.
Early on I decided to do a day-long retreat, which was a challenge for a beginner. That year had been overcast with sadness. I was in my early forties and although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sliding into perimenopause. I didn’t feel like myself, and spurred by flickers of panic, I was trying to bring that feeling back. It was early morning when I arrived at the Catholic convent where the retreat was held. I found the wood-panelled room, laid my cushion at the edge, and, although I’m awkward with strangers, tried to make conversation with the other meditators. Then we sat. My heart thumped its gummy thump in my chest. Then we walked. I padded my way up and down the wide hallways of the convent. They felt never-ending, the walls bare apart from the occasional painting or modest wooden cross. The others walked too, ghosts across the carpet, colourful shapes just outside of seeing.
I made my way to the main doors and walked outside, along the brick facade of the building and down a gentle slope of lawn. The wind rippled the grass. As I stepped, I tried to feel the moment my foot touched the earth, pressed the earth, and then lifted. Touch, press, lift. An elderly nun walked by on a path down the hill, and I thought, I wonder what it’s like being a nun. I thought, there’s bright yellow moss on that tree, and look at the way the feathers around that sparrow’s neck ruff up when it moves side to side. I thought, I wonder if my son is okay. Then I thought, that’s a thought, and with that thought came the understanding that thinking was a way to bring myself into being.
*
A few years ago, my son Sam took up piano. His grandparents bought him a keyboard to practise on at home, the kind with pre-set instruments that allow you to play “Ode to Joy” so it sounds like an accordion. He can read music, but he likes to do things his own way so learns each piece by memory. He does this by playing a song very slowly over and over until his hands remember the tune. The piece he’s learning right now is the Queen classic, “Bohemian Rapsody”. The internet tells me a rhapsody is meant to be free flowing in structure, but he plays the music so slowly it’s like a dirge. He presses a key, and searches—his mind, the sheet music, I’m not sure where. The rest between each note reverberates with the note just played, the space heavy with the note to come.
The slow haunting rhapsody fills our hallway. Each drawn out pause makes my body lean forward with an anticipatory ache. His method makes the music so beautiful I hurt. I take out my phone. He has his bedroom door closed so I quietly rest my shoulder and forehead against the doorframe. If he knew I was there trying to make a memory, he would stop playing. He’d turn away from the piano in embarrassment. But hidden behind his door there is no self-consciousness in his playing, and I don’t want to disturb him. It takes more practice than he’s had to make something elegant while being observed. I push record, and take a video of the flat white wood, the long notes, the silence in between.
*
Mid-life has brought with it the feeling of being discontinuous. I stopped writing a few years ago because when I listened at the door of myself, all I heard was silence. I’d felt known to myself up until then—a young woman striding through life, hitting all the plot points. But the wolf of time shook out her rough coat, opened her mouth, and bit herself in two. Now, she lopes back into memory as much as she runs forward into tomorrow. And here I am in the present moment, squatting beside the veggie garden and scraping a hole to plant a marigold. My hips ache and the earth’s cold on my hands. Alongside ageing, meditation has helped loosen my idea of self. Making time to watch my experience reveals a person that shifts and flickers. She’s a slippery idea, like a fish sliding through reedy waters. The water from the hose sheets off my wrists and arms, and darkens the soil. I dry them on my shirt. It’s hard to see myself clearly, the afternoon sun reflecting off the kitchen window. I still haven’t had enough practice to make something elegant while being observed.
*
Some years ago, I went to see a Sam Taylor-Johnson installation called Brontosaurus, where a wall-sized video showed a naked man dancing to techno in his bedroom. The video had been slowed right down and the techno replaced with Samuel Barber's haunting Adagio for Strings. What would have been frenetic and exhibitionist became tender and mesmerising. I watch it online again as I write this essay. The man’s arms move through slow fluid arcs. He is lean, all ribs and collarbones, the skin stretched thin across his stomach. His long soft penis flops up and down. I think that’s what made me stop and watch in the gallery alcove. He looked vulnerable naked and alone in his room, gyrating in ecstatic oblivion. It made me think that nearly everything is beautiful when we pay close attention. That everything feels poignant when experienced in slow motion. The work is called Brontosaurus because the only object in the room with the dancer is a stuffed purple dinosaur, but I also wonder if it’s about the extinction of everything else but this moment. He never looks at the camera. We don’t exist for him and only his shadow dances on the wall behind.
“In music, silence is the rest between notes that allows us to hear the tune,” writes long-time meditator Joan Duncan Oliver. When my son plays, I hear each note fade and experience it leaving. It’s a small loss—a single note in a hallway—but it’s gone the same way that autumn has gone, and my son being at primary school has gone, and the man dancing in his bedroom has gone, and my clear idea of myself has gone. That’s just the beginning of the list. Later, when I play back the recording of my son at the piano, the whoosh of room noise drowns out the music.
I imagine I’m swimming in a deep lake. Both my mother and son are rowing boats on the lake, hired from the boatshed beside the pier. I’m in the water which is cool and sweet against my chest and thighs, and they are both rowing away from me. There is my mother, her arthritic hands gripping the paddles. She’s going slowly. She rows towards the far shore that’s fallen into shadow. Pines grow thick and tall along the bank. There is my son, his long hair tied back in a ponytail and the fuzz of a moustache starting on his upper lip. He’s fast and concentrated, head down and back fixed. He’s not far from the pier, his boat carving semi-circles as he tries to get the hang of the paddles. The lake surface ripples silver and green with his effort, and my effort as I tread water. I wait for him, watch him head this way and that, and finally he starts to push away with each stroke.
*
We were in Paris a few months ago, at the end of a family holiday. I’d only been to Paris once before when I was twenty years old. On my first evening back then, I struck up a conversation with an American man while we waited for computers at an internet café (this was in the years before smartphones). After I’d emailed my family to let them know I’d arrived, I started to walk back to my hotel. The American chased me down the road and asked if I wanted to have dinner with him. Of course I did. Of course I wanted to have a whirlwind five-day romance in Paris with a man I barely knew, and then for years idealise the experience. I wanted to be the main character in that romantic story. I wanted to hold his hand on the Métro, follow him up the spiral stairs of Notre Dame, and to leave him for an afternoon to see the Mona Lisa with her dark eyes. I wanted to feel the future could be anything. On top of the Arc de Triomphe, he leaned against me, wrapped a wool scarf around my neck and we kissed. It was dusk and a brass band boomed below. Snow began to fall, and the white lights of the evening traffic glittered along the Champs-Élysées.
Now I’m forty-six and with my husband and teenage son in the Louvre. My husband is overwhelmed by the crowds so has gone to sit in a corner and look at his phone. My son and I make our way through The Grande Galerie, past the room with the French Crown jewels and through the vaulted halls of Italian paintings 1250-1800. We’re heading for the Mona Lisa. It’s taking ages because the crowds are moving slowly. My son is restless and a bit bored and would rather be outside in the Parisian sunshine, so I make up the game “Spot Jesus”. We find many faces of Jesus—Jesus as a baby with an adult face, Jesus as an infant with a lamb, Jesus with two angels looking rhapsodic.
We reach Room 711, her room. On the far wall I see a hint of the bullet-proof glass case. There are at least fifty people crushed together in the centre of the room. We join the crowd at the back and start inching forward. I take Sam’s hand to try and slide us between people. Six rows to go and there’s a big man with a beard pushing next to us. Five rows to go. Nearly everyone in front of us is holding one arm up in the air, their phone in hand. They’re a writhing beast of rectangular lights. But I want to see the Mona Lisa with my eyes, like I did when I was twenty. I want to see the Mona Lisa so I can reach back and touch that moment, to touch that old self, to somehow collapse the divide of time. But Sam starts to move backwards now, tugging my hand. He’s had enough. He doesn’t care who his mother was before he was born. He doesn’t care about the young woman who turns her head towards us, looking out from a misty landscape.
*
For years they didn’t know who the woman was in the Mona Lisa. It was only in 2005 that Armin Schlechter, a German librarian, found a marginal note in a manuscript from 1503. The note written by Agostino Vespucci, an employee of the chancellery in Florence, mentioned three works that Da Vinci was working on. One was a painting of Lisa del Gioconda, the wife of a silk merchant in Florence. When she sat for Da Vinci, Lisa was a young woman at twenty-four. She had six children and seven siblings. She was named after her grandmother. Her dowry was her father’s most valuable farm. Two of her children died as toddlers. She bought snail water from a local convent to use as medicine. These are some of the facts that are known about her, some of her story, which isn’t much.
What is known is that Da Vinci started work on the Mona Lisa in 1503, and he never stopped working on the painting. He kept the Mona Lisa with him, changing the portrait up until he died in 1519. The silk merchant who commissioned the work never received the painting of his wife, which is probably good because after years of tweaks, she no longer looked like the Lisa he’d married. Da Vinci had poured all he had learned about anatomy (his research involved performing autopsies on cadavers), colour, and geography into the painting. It became less a portrait of a woman and more a self-portrait of everything Da Vinci knew. When you look at her, you see him.
*
The bathroom back at our Paris AirBnB has a 360-degree mirror. It’s strange to see myself from the back and the side, and all the way around. To see the equine profile I never see, or the square shape of my hips. It’s not that I dislike my body—at least not today—it’s just disorienting. I’m used to seeing myself from one angle, one viewpoint. I try not to look while I brush my teeth.
I’ve noticed that in all the museums we’ve visited on this trip, people don’t look directly at paintings anymore. It wasn’t just the Mona Lisa. People look at art through their phones. Not that I’m any better. Every evening of our trip, I post photos from the day to my Instagram stories. I say I’m doing it for my friends, but really it’s a form of self-narration. I did this; I went here. Fragments made into a story with me as the protagonist. Like Da Vinci, I’m working on my self-portrait until I die. We all want to exist. We want our time to mean something and be important. But more than that, we want it to make sense.
But sense isn’t always easy to come by. I still sometimes feel loudly in the wrong place. This is the first thing I’ve written in three years so why have I imagined myself swimming, which is something I never do? Don’t I know that the Mona Lisa’s fame came about because she was stolen and then recovered, as much as artistic merit? I kept track of that American over the years, and he’s just an ordinary man with dark hair and a clean shave who lives in New York and works in urban planning. And I’m an ordinary woman full of the disappointments and wonders of life. I don’t know if my twenty-year-old self would feel disappointed by where we’ve ended up. If we sat down together for a cup of tea, I might be able to convince her that our life is exactly how it was meant to be. But would that be the truth? The self is the most unreliable narrator.
My son’s had a cell phone since he was nine, but until recently he hasn’t used it for anything but calling me and playing dinosaur battle games. The other day I asked to borrow it—his camera is much better than mine—to film myself doing squats and deadlifts so I could send the videos to a friend who’s a personal trainer. According to the internet, menopause is the time to lift weights and lift heavy. After I texted myself the videos, I noticed two selfies my son had taken among the wonkily framed photos of our cat and shots of his friends eating fish and chips. These are probably the first self-portraits he’s taken. In one, his face and shoulders are framed to the left of the photo. The dark background has turned his skin milky, and he’s making gentle eye contact with the camera. He has a slight smile—not the real smile of hello when he sees someone he likes, or the wide toothy smile he makes when he knows he’s being funny. It’s the smile of seeing himself and deciding who that might be. It’s tentative, intimate, banal, and heart-breaking all at the same time.
*
Does it matter if the portrait of a woman stops resembling the woman, and instead becomes a portrait of memory and story? One of my favourite meditation teachers Adyashanti says, “All words are partial” because, as he argues, words take away from the wholeness of life. He thinks that trying to describe something breaks it apart. And while I understand his intention and don’t disagree, describing and remembering, however imperfectly, is an act of love for the world.
On our last evening in Paris, I go for a walk by myself around the Place des Vosges, which is an old, planned square in the Marais district. It has an ornate gated park with a fluted fountain in the centre, rows of shaped linden trees, and short cropped planes of grass. People have just finished work and the square is getting busy. A couple lies on a picnic rug in the dappled shade. A man sits on a bench with a book crooked in one hand, a cigarette in the other. A group of young men throw an American football across the sky in long fluid arcs while I stand and watch them. I would like to say that I feel twenty again, but I don’t. I feel fluid and deep, like a woman in her late forties. Like a woman standing in ecstatic joy on the grass. Like a woman playing the song of herself until her hands remember the tune.
Works Cited
Da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa. 1503-1506. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
Oliver, Joan Duncan. “The Sound of Silence.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Nov. 12, 2015. https://tricycle.org/article/sound-of-silence. Accessed 3 July 2025.
Taylor-Johnson, Sam. Brontosaurus. 1995. City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand.