Tag: Small Moments

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Tending My Most Precious Resource

The quality of my attention guides the trajectory of my spiritual growth. It’s the beating heart at the center of any practice – watching the breath in meditation, feeling the body stretch and find new shape in yoga, searching inward during prayer. My ability to direct and sustain my attention is what opens all possibilities. Without it, I’m adrift, bouncing between events, controlled by old patterns that no longer serve me.

As I experience it, the major obstacle to shifting the seat of my consciousness are my patterns of past conditioning. I spent my early years learning the wonders and terrors of being a physical being in a material world. My ego learned how to navigate life at the level of survival and acquisition, avoiding what hurt and pursuing what I desired. These ego skills were useful, necessary steps in my development, and I am grateful for them. But they created internal structures of belief that spring into action automatically. I have to encounter and redirect these patterns in order to grow. And I can’t do that if I don’t see them.

My attention is like a tender plant with deep roots. It needs my care. With water, it blooms. Neglected, it withers. All it takes is for me to use it with awareness, to place attention on whatever I am experiencing and let it instruct me. When I do, new worlds step out from the ordinary. A flat curtain opens and the scene gains depth. Colors become colors because I notice. Details share their fullness. Immediate. Intimate. But when I am caught in the old patterns, I lose touch with my attention. My senses retreat, details flatten. Life skims along the surface in a dull, repetitive motion. The sacred evaporates.

In a world of constant distraction, my attention is always at risk. My screens are never far away, calling to me, promising rich experience. But they are engineered by those who know well the patterns of my past conditioning and how to tickle my addictive vulnerabilities. The screens are happy to have me stay, devouring my attention for as long as they can. Luckily, the roots are resilient. It doesn’t take much to strengthen them. Radical abstinence is not needed, there is great value in small steps. Moving the rudder, even slightly, changes where the ship ends up.

I have been trying small steps lately to reduce my screen time. I avoid going to my devices first thing in the morning. I spend the first hour of the day enjoying the analog world. Everything I need will be there later, but the first light of morning will be gone. I’ve gone back to wearing a wristwatch so I don’t reach for the phone to see the time. When I feel an impulse to open my laptop, I spend a moment paying attention to the urge itself. Sometimes I find the need was not so important, that it was more out of habit.

I have not mastered these steps, it’s a work in progress. I try to remember that everything is practice. My response to every occasion leaves an impression, a thumbprint history of my experience. I hold on to as many of the good ones as I can, and let the stale ones fall away.

Photo by A.C. for Unsplash

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The Instant After Mindfulness

I love my wakeful moments, when awareness interrupts my train of worries. I take a step back from the minutiae of activity, and a different world comes into view. It’s like a static you don’t notice until it stops, and you realize silence has been waiting underneath. The contrast between mindfulness and mindlessness is startling. Objects gather weight and texture when I really see them instead of glancing past. People gain warmth and nuance. I notice myself more fully. I seem more real, more me. I feel excitement, but also a twinge of shame that I was caught by the static. I want to be mindful, I don’t want to be mindless.

It all happens in a snap – the flash of awareness, the dropping static, the appearing silence, the brilliant seeing, the finger-wagging, the desire for one, the aversion of the other – they don’t come in sequence but arrive in a clump, which makes the decision point hard to see. The instant after mindfulness, there is a pull I am not mindful of. I am drawn to the richness of my wakeful self, so obviously superior to the contraction of my smaller, mindless self. It feels like a switch. I go from flat to full, from vacant to vivid. Internally. I feel myself turning to enter a different room, one that is less worried, more calm. I want to stay here.

But to turn toward something is to turn my back on something else, a subtle rejection of the room I am leaving. I want to be awake, but something is amiss if it leaves the taste of judgment in my mouth. In the mindless me, there are countless pieces I criticize and avoid. If I have a wakeful moment while scrolling my phone, I feel like a wino caught in the alley. Judgment only pushes him further into the corner.

I have recently started to notice this hidden decision point and am doing something different. Instead of turning and entering, I expand. I don’t try to enter more deeply into awareness, I try to stay where I am and include everything, my excitement and my shame. I welcome all the pieces. After all, acceptance is the first and perhaps the ultimate step in loving. And to be loving is what I want too. The pieces that are petty, impatient, worrisome, are not what keep me from paying attention. They are pieces craving my attention.

If my larger aspiration is not to be more mindful, but to be more mindful and more loving, then I should use them both to amplify each other, two strands entwined for strength. The wakeful moment is my opportunity to come more fully into a stance of loving. Living from a stance of love can be cultivated, just as living mindfully. I can mold them together, waking into a truer sense of me.

Photo by Go to Karolina Grabowska on Unsplash

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Tears

Recently, I find tears come to me easily. I’m not sure why.

Maybe it was the passing of my parents two years ago. A broken hip and pneumonia, a broken heart and dementia, a numbing fog in and out of hospital rooms. In eight months, they were both gone. Or maybe it’s the background hum of an unstable world that seems to grow darker every day. Or maybe it’s my advancing age, and the realization that my remaining sunsets have a finite number, making each beautiful and horrible thing so precious, I can’t afford to let it pass unnoticed.

I’m in the sanctuary of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, Portugal. I’ve been sitting for an hour, sitting with my thoughts, sitting with questions in a place people have come for centuries seeking answers, or at least solace. I’m wondering why we are continually confronted with impossible questions. It can’t be that we expect clean answers, a formula with algebraic precision. It’s more like the tangents of a wicked geometry, the curve of my mind measuring whether the points are coming together or falling away.

At the heart of our wondering, I think, is the desire to know we are living a moral life, and that can only be known by walking through the brambles of impossible questions and making choices. We look for a source of wisdom to lay the question against, see where it fits, where the corners stick, and take guidance as best we can. Over time, we find that some sources of wisdom serve us better, or are more suited to our nature, or grow with us as we walk. Wisdom shows us truth in glimmers, as light through a moving curtain, and something in our soul remembers and points our steps in one direction or another.

How does this philosophizing help me with my questions? Why did my parents’ deaths unfold the way they did? How do I hold the country I love even as it transgresses the bounds of evil? Do I give or refuse the man begging change outside the bottle shop? Is my life significant beyond the people I touch in this small flicker of time?

When I am still for a time, a frame of mind can come where my thinking slips to the back and a fuller presence comes forward. Under the quiet of the gothic vaults and blue-white tiles of the sanctuary, I let go of myself. The space absorbs me, my inner and outer indistinct. I feel large but empty, a weight floating at the top of my chest like a bruise. It wants to move but can’t find a way out.

A father wanders through, his young daughter, a tassel of curls, holding his hand. At a side chapel, she leaves him and moves toward a stand of votives. I watch her gaze into the candles and then hurry back to take his hand and place her head against his hip. An ache rises in my throat and my eyes spill over. What is this glimmer? A pair of strangers and their tender moment, a source of wisdom.

Photo by Steve Sphar

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The Danger of the Familiar

It’s easy for me to think I know what’s about to happen. The routine of my morning meditation lulls me into assuming things will unfold the same as they did yesterday, or last week. Familiarity presents a danger, because instead of experiencing the moment, I am experiencing my memory of a moment, a shallow, mental image that fogs the window. I am not fully here, I’m a tiny step removed from the current of my life; literally, the current moment.

“Danger” may seem an exaggeration. After all, we can’t avoid feeling the familiarity of things. But there is tangible loss when the familiar fools me into thinking I know this space. When I zone out, I miss out. If I stay curious about what is here, my perceptions sharpen. Noticing the tension in my shoulders, I start to sense the fibers and connective tissue inside the muscle. Grounding attention where I touch the floor, I feel the bones in my feet and whether the ligaments are tight or loose. Subtle emotions appear under my breath; sensations without names knock at the window. The quality of my attention alters, gathering itself, becoming finer, more spacious, attuned to the currents moving through me.

The river of experience is always moving, always opening to more. This may not be apparent in the moment, when it feels as if I am fully open to awareness as it is, that what I see is the observable limit. But then the fog clears, the horizon extends, and I’m invited to travel further on.

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Thanks – Giving

Thanksgiving has two words within it. We tend to focus on the first.

When I reflect on what I’m thankful for, the obvious comes to mind first. I have all I need to flourish and be happy – plentiful food, a wonderful home, and people who care about me. I don’t live in a country torn by war or famine. I’m not threatened by militia or poverty or natural disaster. The luck of being dropped into this life is hard to believe, a humbling grace.

But while true, these can feel abstract. What touches me more directly are the small, intimate moments that mostly pass without my notice. Like the street scene I saw this week in Oaxaca.

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First Taste

The first taste is different.

Preparation is part of the practice. The morning custom of grinding beans, filling water, turning on the heat, all take time, and add to the suspense. I’m sure part of my anticipation is fueled by a low-grade addiction, my psyche craving the familiar comfort that is coming. Whether habit or chemical stimulation, I want it.

And when the grounds have steeped, the alchemy complete, I pick up the pot and pour. The bottom of the cup receives the steam and splash, stopping at the proper fill. I set down the pot and reach over, my fingers take the handle, tighten, feel the small but precious weight, and lift. The ancient aroma of the Americas rises up to greet me. I draw a cooling breath across the surface of the liquid, touch my lips to the rim, and sip. A smile inside me settles as I lower the cup, the ritual performed, the blessing received.

I enjoy the remainder well enough, but it doesn’t match the first moment. I attend to other parts of the morning, chores or worries or details, and taking up the cup again becomes an afterthought, a reflex. The spell is broken, the aura gone. The morning fades to normal.

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Learning to See the Light

Is it really true that sunlight is more beautiful in some places than others? I am stunned into silence by occasional flashes of radiance, yet I spend most of my time completely unaware, in the dark, so to speak. Is it my noticing that makes it beautiful? How many moments am I missing?

Physics would say the properties of light don’t change. A stream of photons travels as a wave, and if its length is right, I see the light. A wavelength of 500 nanometers equals green, never red or violet. Slip below 300 or above 800, and no human eye can see it, no matter how beautiful.

But the physics of a thing is not the perception of a thing, and many tangents cloud or clear perception. Light travels farther through the atmosphere during its morning and evening commute than it does at noon. The angle bends tighter at the top of the globe, latitudes shrinking as they travel north. Our axis tilts, seasons give or take away. Summer splashes, winter hides. The air may be thick and humid or windblown and dry; glittered with dust or cleared by rain. Clouds might be bulbous white, a flat of gray, or broken into strata like window blinds. Or entirely absent, allowing a span of horizon edge to edge in blinding blue.

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The Gift of My Discomfort

Every year, I face a seven-week challenge that hits a major weak spot. I’m not good at visualizing what others would want for gifts. Between December 25 and February 14, I have to contend with Christmas, my wife’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and Valentine’s Day. That’s an entire year’s worth of stressful shopping and gift expectations distilled into 52 days.

To top it off, my wife is a fantastic shopper with tender insight into the needs and desires of others. My wife will see a handcrafted soap dish and say, “This would be perfect for your brother and sister-in-law, the colors match the wallpaper in their bathroom.” I am dumbstruck as I struggle to remember:  do they have a bathroom?

It’s good to acknowledge discomfort and recognize our reactions to it. For me, shopping for others causes anxiety, so I could easily decide to avoid it. But the edge of anxiety is where growth happens. If we only do what is comfortable and avoid what is uncomfortable, we stagnate. I’m committed to making this life a learning journey, not a catalog of the ways to lead a pleasurable life. I try to use the first inkling of discomfort as a signal that there is something here for me to learn, an old pattern of reactivity that might be ready to unravel. Instead of avoiding, I turn toward it to see how I can grow.

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The Three Breath Pause

There are some practices I do as part of my daily, scheduled routine. I rotate between several, but these often include stretching, meditation, spiritual reading, journaling, or prayer. These are part of my ongoing commitment to strengthen my capacity for focus, awareness, and insight.

But there is another category of practice I call in-the-moment practices that occur spontaneously. One I have adopted recently is a three breath pause. It works like this.

I pick an ability I want to develop or an intention I want to hold for the day. For example, it might be:

    • Don’t interrupt
    • Appreciate beauty
    • Be aware of sensations in my body
    • Don’t eat unless I’m hungry
    • Open my heart

During the day, I become engrossed in thoughts or activities, as we do. But when I remember my intended focus, I stop what I’m doing and pause for three breaths, each one a little slower and deeper. I focus on my intention and let it settle with each breath into my psyche. Then I go on with my day.

Sometimes, my remembering comes at a moment when I’m nervous and distracted, and the three breaths don’t center me very much. Other times, my pause awakens me and grounds my intention more firmly. Either way, I am extending my spiritual practice to random moments throughout the day, giving it added weight and stability.

These pauses often increase my insight into the intention that I picked. “Don’t interrupt,” morphs into, “Listen.” “Be aware of your body,” becomes, “What is this tightness I feel, anxiety?” I realize that “Don’t eat unless hungry” is almost impossible, and points to my food addiction, seeking false comfort to counter old fear patterns. I roll these insights into the practice, focusing on them during my next three breath sequence.

Three breaths is long enough to shift my attention out of autopilot, but short enough to do in the moment. I find it’s an easy way to sprinkle more time and attention every day on whatever spiritual aspect I’m working on.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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Meeting in the Crosswalk

I had never come this close to hitting a pedestrian. So close.

I was on 19th Street, a busy thoroughfare I’ve driven a thousand times. The light coming through the canopy seemed ordinary, the buildings familiar, but something felt off. The part of my brain that senses below the surface registered that something was amiss. The light was green, but the car in the right lane was stopped. I slowed down.

A slight motion flickered in front of the stopped car, and I touched the brakes. A man entered my field of vision, stepping directly in front of my car. Adrenaline exploded. I stood on the brakes with everything I had, my eyes flung open. I might have yelled, I’m not sure. The man was looking straight ahead, chin high, the look of someone who crosses against the light to show he can.

The instant I flickered into his vision, his eyes flung open too, meeting mine, locked. In that moment, time hung in the air, everything got close. There was nothing else on earth, just he and me sharing the same bolt of adrenaline. He might have yelled, I’m not sure, if he did, we shared that too. There were no words in that microsecond, but we were both wishing hard for the same nonresult. My bumper stopped a foot before his body.

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