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