What's It All About?

Every so often I go through a kind of crisis of I don’t know what—confidence maybe? Existence perhaps? I don’t know, but anyway these feelings come and go in waves.  They say when you retire, you should only do the things you want to do—only the things you really like, and perhaps have never had time for.  And I often ask myself, what is that? What is it that I really want to do? Today I went to the gym and spoke to two people separately I haven’t seen for a while—it was a pleasure and made me smile, ferried someone around to the shops and to catch a train, watched on TV a bit of ‘The World at War’ and saw for the millionth time how the Allies fared on D-Day, did some work on my bike, thought in anticipation about the meeting I was going to have that evening with someone from one of my mindfulness courses, prepared for my next evening course session, did some emails, wondered why some people reply really quickly and others don’t—and started to write this post.

And a clock is ticking steadily and loudly in front of me—and behind me too (there are two clocks in the room, and if you’re mindful of the echoing sound they make, it’s like a slow, metronomic, mesmeric rally in an unwinnable tennis match!), vehicles are passing by quickly and airily, rubber-to-road outside as people rush to get where they’re going, a picture smiles back at me capturing a moment of happy relief in our garden on the day all those years ago when me and my wife actually finished our degree courses—an original ‘selfie’ taken by camera on timer with old-fashioned tripod—and I can still feel the joyful moments now as I look at us and the girls framed by flowers and greenery, then I’m noticing my desk is a mess but not too bad, seeing there’s an old tape-measure there too and I’m wondering what it’s for, and in the next instant, I have the flashing image in mind from this morning, of me on my bike flying round a blind-bend and feeling really stupid because for the first time in ages I hadn’t rung my bell and there were loads of people and kids on the pathway there! Brake…. smile and mouth ‘....Sorry....!!’ comically, and glide on by. Another catastophe that didn’t happen. And I’m just hearing outside what I think is a child in distress crying, and looking fairly urgently and warily out of the window, I see clearly that it’s actually two boys larking around having great fun with a football, really enjoying themselves in all their ‘boy-ness’. Big smile to this!

And all these noticings and reflections are my life! The life I question, have crises about and don’t know what to do with. Come to think of it, the life I’ve always had crises about, always questioned and always didn’t know what to do with. Well it happened anyway, and thankfully it’s still happening now. All those bits of awareness and fragments of a life that tell me I exist—that tell me I’m here, that I showed up and was present for these moments, big and small, good and not so good at all—hooray—I am here!

I’m sure I had an idea in mind when I started to write this post, but can’t for the life of me think what it was. The mini-wave crisis of confidence and existence seems thankfully to have passed (temporarily I'm sure). And at this moment, I'm mindful of a whole new world visually, because I just picked up from the opticians my new prescription lense glasses! I can see a little more clearly and brightly now, and of course I suppose that's it, I am clearly doing what I want to do, and I am clearly doing what I like (at least some of the time) and this is it, this is my life. 

In any case, stuff like this that happens and that unfolds from moment-to-moment that I’m truly here for—and sometimes fully awake to and aware of—is far more interesting than the complications my mind wants to make of it all. The simple stuff, the trivial stuff, the mundane, the routine, the boring.... plus the disturbing, the worrying, the draining.... the uplifting, the changing, the exciting..... the rich mindful noticings of all this. It doesn’t matter what it is—it’s all the stuff of Life. These noticings are what it's all about. 

Let's celebrate that with all our senses.

And I love the fact the old tape measure's got 'Cosmos' written on it.

I thought I was still 25

There is so much pain and suffering in the World and I think to myself how lucky I am that I don’t suffer all the time. Since last September though, I’ve often experienced a bit too much pain for comfort—it’s a fact! Pain in the back and leg, pain in the eye, pain in various joints—and aside from the physical pain—quite a bit of emotional pain too. This last one goes hand in hand with the actual pain—they come together as a package. Can’t do much about it of course, except live with it. Well, that’s not exactly true, because just like we all do, I have tried to get rid of it or at least make it less troublesome. I’ve seen a chiropractor, a physiotherapist, various doctors and an eye surgeon. I’ve also taken more eye drops and pain-killers (why do we call them that?) than ever before.

Thankfully, and blissfully, at this moment, there is what Thich Nhat Hanh refers to with a whistful sigh..... as….. ‘the absence of pain’.

He says this with—as I distinctly recall, a beautiful half-smile—or at least he did until recently when in his 80’s he had a stroke. He is recovering now and they say his smile is coming back—although he can’t speak again yet. I wonder if he is able to be mindful of his moment-to-moment experience now. 

I do hope so.

Some of the time I’m grateful to be mindful of all this pain. It does remind me that I’m alive. I hope I ‘practice what I preach’ in guiding others to directly turn towards the pain themselves in the moment and over time look deeply to notice how the sensory qualities of the pain change in intensity, together with all the thoughts and feelings that accompany the pain. Just Noticing, Observing and Witnessing. When I tell people I do this myself, for example when visiting the dentist, or when having the eye operation recently at the hospital—as an ‘opportunity to be mindful’—they often laugh and say I’m a masochist! I don’t think I am—I find the experience neither pleasurable nor painful. Well not as painful as it might be if I weren’t being mindful anyway. I should add that I don’t want to be a pain—the pain by itself is real enough—I just don’t want to add to it. But I know that I can be a pain some of the time. I’m sorry for that—please forgive me. Not being able to do things like go to the gym, ride my bike, or play as much with the grand kids can be very tiresome, frustrating and irritating. So plenty to be mindful of there. 

Bit by bit, I hope I can recover some of the ability to be as active as before, but to be honest in darker moments, my biggest fear is that maybe this is it and I’ll have to accept any limitations just as they are. I suppose that does happen naturally anyway—accepting limitations that is. Like fading eyesight concealing the ravages of time—nature can sometimes have a way of letting us down gently. So it was a bit of a shock recently after having a cloudy lense in my eye replaced with a crystal clear one. Blimey!! The brightness and the colour and the sharpness and…. and…. is that me?! Oh heck, I thought I was still 25.