Mindless Mindfulness?

I haven’t blogged in such a long time. Guess this mindfulness thing is a lot more challenging than I would have thought; then again, maybe its not. Maybe sometimes we use it just to get through a moment which would otherwise leave us feeling hopeless and helpless and we don’t even realize it. It just happens and it gets us through. Mindless mindfulness?

These past few months have presented a multitude of opportunities for me to try on my colors. A roller coaster of emotions and life events requiring me to be in the moment; even the moments I cared not to be in. I’ve watched someone I love more than life itself despair over the loss of a dream and then celebrated the news of new beginnings for another during the same day. I’ve sat by someone dear to me when the doctor told her she had stage III breast cancer, and obliged her request on Christmas, shaving her head even though I quietly cried as I stood behind her fragile, delicate body. Then, only weeks later, I felt the joy of hearing the tumor was responding to chemo and that she would, ultimately, find some reprise from the devastation she had experienced. Additionally,
I recall how I felt betrayal from being physically injured by an animal I loved and trusted, and grief as I held a kindred spirit feline while he breathed his last breath in my arms.

My intention is not to focus on negative moments. For through it all there was a constancy of knowing things were really okay. There was having the security and love of a supportive, patient husband making me laugh and showing me the world through his funny, playful eyes; hearing my little baby grandchild’s vocabulary grow with each phone call until he finally said his own rendition of the word grandma “bahka”; trips to New York and Boston and meeting so many wonderful people along the way. There’s the security of being offered a job months before I’ve even graduated. There are the new friends that I’ve made in such a short time and the satisfaction of knowing that the long hours of study and clinical hours are taking us all to places in our lives where our work will leave a mark somehow, somewhere for someone… even if we never know it did.

Life. Its made of so many surprises. Then comes the question: What do we do with them? My first inclination is to say that I totally let my quest for middle aged mindfulness go out the window with each event. And, if I am talking about the cognitive, deliberate action of recognizing it for what it is… I probably did. But then there is that other voice, that still little piece of my inner self, my “God” that simmers deeper inside that reminds me of the clarity I felt during some of those moments, and realize that I was more in the moment during the extremes highs and lows than at any other times in my life. It’s the times in between that need the work!

I often hear people say things like, “How could God let that happen?”, or, “If there is such a thing as God, we wouldn’t suffer.” Well, my answer is, first, depending on what your expectations really are and what you perceive “God” to be, perhaps these things happen specifically because it is through those moments that we define ourselves and really feel the presence of life itself. Maybe, until we really figure out how to capture that focus and fuse it into everyday, mundane moments, we will continue to witness that which we think we don’t want – only to find out that on some level… we do!

Who knows what the next months have to offer for me or anyone else? Maybe there will be even more painful moments; maybe Nirvana. Whatever. The important thing is that we do our best to get through them and then, when we look back, we see the lesson in it all. At least then it is not all in vein.