Fully In This Moment

I spend a lot of time with 6 month old Luke. He has learned to sit and is working quite hard on crawling. He can be mesmerized by a basketful of toys. He picks up one and moves it from one hand to the other in total concentration. We call it playing. It looks like work.

I am reading a book on mindfulness, which simply put, means being able to be fully in the moment you are in, rather than thinking about what happened before or what is coming next. Luke is my best example of that.

Luke is happy holding the toy he has in his hand until it falls out of his hand. If he sees it fall or hears it land he looks to where it is and tries to pick it up. If not, it is on to the next toy. He doesn’t spend much time on regrets. Even in the deepest concentration on the toys, if he hears his mother’s voice, he becomes disengaged from the toys and completely present to her.

I am not like Luke. When I am writing, I am also aware that the whites are in the washer and the darks still need to be hung out to dry. I’m thinking about how many loaves of bread are left and if I will need to find time to bake yet today. Would it hurt the writing too much if I alternated writing with the steps to making bread? And then I remember a painful verbal encounter which frustrates my concentration as I mentally devise comebacks that would have summarily silenced the attack.

Not present in the moment. Present everywhere but the moment.

The most frustrating time to be ‘absent’ from the moment is during prayer. When I reach the final lines of the Lord’s Prayer and can’t remember praying the rest of it I know I was not really there for the prayer. Does God answer prayers when my mouth is praying without my mind? My prayer time would be much shorter if I did not have to repeat the prayers so many times in order to actually pray them.

I am working on it. When I go out to the garden, can I think in terms of the fun it is to find good things growing there? Can I not worry about whether I have time to process the food immediately?

I’m told that the best way to reach that goal is to practice doing nothing for a little while each day. Not doing nothing and feeling guilty about it, but sitting and accepting the thoughts that are there, the things I am seeing, the sounds I am hearing, the feelings I have. It would be good to take a little bit of time each day noticing and accepting what is.