A journey to find my creative self.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Being Mindful and Catching the rest of that 99% of life

I've begun to do volunteer work with a local literary journal that
just published its first edition. I'm taking care of their data entry
for subscribers.

Yesterday, I was so swamped with work issues and problems, and nothing
seemed to go my way. Spent the weekend doing social things and my
hives were flaring up as as result of the crap I ate as well. So, by
the end of the day, I felt stressed out and not really feeling as
though I could honestly do this work with a sense of mindfulness. I
very nearly asked Linda if I could go off and meditate somewhere
before beginning the work; but when I arrived, she was hurrying
through catching me up on things and rushing out to some sort of show.

Before I knew it, I was sitting in front of the Mac, typing away at
the various things I had gone to work on, and the stress had floated
out of my system. After working for a couple of hours, I packed up.
As I walked to my car, I looked beyond the car to where sat a pond,
and I saw a family of geese with lots of goslings waddling about,
enjoying the lawn and the beautiful evening. It made me realize that
of the month or so that I've been going to that place to work, I'd not
really noticed how beautiful the pond was. On the other side of the
driveway was a pen of what looked like fresh vegetables. I remember
reading a story that linda wrote about her first chicks, and how she
lost them to some sort of disease. I'll have to see if she still has
chickens.

The concept of mindfulness and stopping to smell the roses is a
constant, daily thing that I need to keep paying attention to. I've
had a lifetime of not giving a shit about roses and anything else but
getting from where I am to where I want to be going, and being blind
to all of the stuff in between.

If you take a straight line, and look at the two endpoints, you'll
notice that 99.99% of the line is all of the stuff in between the two
endpoints. How much of life have I missed?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it's all about coming back into this moment. Doing nothing, going nowhere.

The truth is I think NOW is all there is. There are no endpoints, no line, just this one point here.

Jane said...

I hadn't thought of it that way! That makes so much sense!