two more thoughts on mediation

I was looking at a painting with my glasses off last night and I realized that there's this interesting tension between looking actively and having the visual world roll over you that becomes heightened by the blurriness of vision. When I am forced to exist in the world without my glasses, everything visual becomes sort of less important. It's just there, and I can roughly tell where, but I can't see anything distinct until its within a foot of my eyes. The two responses to this, as I see them, are to fight it and squint your way through the world, attempting to make sense of what can never be sharp, or to relax and think of other things, relying less on vision to navigate your space. Maybe this is something like meditation, the way meditation's goal is, in a sense, to relax out of your mind, letting it fall away to be replaced by something else, some higher version of thought.

Yes, the interesting part of looking at this painting with my glasses off was that I could see all the same things that I can see with glasses on. I could see the way the shapes are abstracted, and the forms that they can become if I open myself up to that transfiguration. And by thinking about those things, those possible interpretations, I completely forgot that I wasn't wearing glasses. I'm sure this was a work out for my eyes, but it was amazing to me to think that I could still interpret the world without the perceptual clarity that I am used to. It makes me wonder what kind of world I would understand if I were deaf, or blind.

And, more specifically about mediation, I've been thinking that it is one of my main issues with Buddhism. I feel as though I pretty much agree with and understand most of the issue based teachings that we have gone over in class. I dont feel like I have any batles to fight there: I place importance in my life in almost all of the same places it seems Buddhists place importance. With one critical exception: meditaion. I could never be a Buddhist because I could never sustain mediation. I squirm, and I think, and I hate the discipline of it. I love the idea, of course, but in practice, I can't see how it would work for me. I've never been one for physical practice of any sort (practicing instruments, going to the gym, etc... I've tried doing them on a regime and it has never worked for me.) And its interesting, too, because while all of Buddhism's other doctrines are so situationally specific, meditation is a "medicine" for just about every ailment. Different kinds of meditiation, yes, but meditiation none the less.

Is there a Buddhism without meditation? What would that look like? Or to put it another way, could Buddhism in fact be too attached to meditiation?