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.