What is this life if,
full of care,
We have no time
to stand and stare.No time to
stand beneath the boughs
And stare as
long as sheep or cows.No time to see,
when woods we pass,
Where squirrels
hide their nuts in grass.No time to see,
in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars,
like skies at night.No time to turn
at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet,
how they can dance.No time to wait
till her mouth can
Enrich that
smile her eyes began.A poor life this if,
full of care,
We have no time
to stand and stare.
I hope you like this poem, it was my mum's favourite and its words are always a warm hug to me : )
I love how it brings me back and gets right to the 'now-nub', too. And today it reminded me of something a very stressed colleague said to me the other day:
“Right, that's it, from tomorrow I must start practicing more mindfulness!”
I felt for her. Burnt out, trying her best, working herself to the bone - trying to find a way to help herself among soaring-stress juggles.
In all honesty, we shouldn't need to practice mindfulness or meditation. Naturally, our lives should, and once did, foster this natural state beautifully for us. We lived according to nature's rhythms, in tune and in touch and connected. Unless we needed to fight or flee (hi sabre-toothed tiger), in which case our adrenaline response kicked in, we speared or we ran, our adrenaline burnt off and our brains re-set; we got back to nature and making cave babies and fire with sticks. Simples.
But along came the 20th century and suddenly our fight-or-flightresponse got screwy. Fast-track to the 21st century and now the tiger gets replaced by Liz Truss's budget or the school WhatsApp group or 24-7 newsreels or the fear our boobs / balls aren't big enough.
As Ruby Wax put it, “we can't kill the traffic warden” so we don't fight, we repress, and our primal brain retains a constant state offight-or-flight purely to survive rush hour or the wrong wallpaper (with enough adrenaline to kill a small monkey*).
*I don't actually know if what I just said about monkey-killing-adrenaline is true, but let's not find out!
Now, we need to “make time” for mindfulness and meditation. Which is a paradox, as the only “time” that exists is now. All too easily we can find ourselves seeing a mindful or meditation practice as another thing to "book in", "cram in", another thing to “achieve” or “fail” in the future.
Personally I do have a practice, as I know my cave-lady brain is not 21st century-equipped. I meditate morning and evening and this “re-set” has the neurological side-effect of me 'being' more mindful (i.e. justbeing!), throughout the day. However, I feel we need to be “mindful” of our approach. A five-minute meditation practice shouldn't just be 'ticked off' the to-do list so we can get on with being unmindful for the rest of the day. Putting off mindfulness for a "better" or `"less stressful time" kind of defeats the object.
These ancient practices of awareness and presence became packaged as modern-day “mindfulness”: wonderful but also a risk of becoming a self-serving solution to keeping us in a highly-functioning, perfection-driven -- but not-necessarily-blissful -- state. By focussing on mindfulness outcomes like: “maximising performance” “losing weight” “boosting sex drive” “reducing stress”, we westernise and modernise powerful age-old techniques that have proven health and brain benefits, but in doing so deny ourselves the real magic and meaning and bliss that's available.
Simply stopping and staring right now is what brings us back to the true peace of presence, back in-tune with how fully we can really live.
What if you put the stress down, no matter how imperfect or inconvenient this moment seems?
What if you just stopped and stared?
And what if right now was just enough?
Love, Jo x
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