Being Mindfully Me

April 11, 2020

I don’t know what day of quarantine this is. I’ve purposefully not tracked it. I’m discovering there are competing voices in my head. The first says, “Just keep living. Everything’s gonna be fine.” The other says, “What the hell are you thinking? The world is ending and you have no idea.”

I wake at odd hours with nonsensical thoughts like, “Do you want to live your life as an elephant or a dandelion?”  And these questions keep me awake. There’s an urgent desire to come up with an answer to questions I don’t even understand.

The feeling follows me into the morning when I wake to a mixed bag of happy and overwhelming sad. There’s no separation between the emotion, just one rolling wave of extreme. Like standing at the edge of the ocean, my feet in wet sand, each wave causing me to sink a little deeper until I’m no longer able to maintain my balance and the intensity knocks me to my knees.

This pandemic is a calm ocean at rising tide. Ripples kissing the shore softly. Castles melting slowly into the sea. Beachgoers inching their chairs to avoid the waves, quietly denying the inevitable.

I want to scream, “Move your fucking chairs! Go to the dunes! It’s the only way to avoid the waves.” You’re teasing yourselves with the inching of chairs. The waves are kissing your feet and gently lapping your toys. You think they aren’t hurting you until randomly a bucket is swept away and you’re left to run into the ocean to fetch it. Now you risk the undertow. The lucky ones avoid it. The weaker ones are sucked under. Rescuers swim out to help. Some of them are successful, others not.

All the while, I’m screaming, “Just move your fucking chairs!”

We can all sit on the dunes and watch the waves, separately together, from our chairs. And soon the tide will change. The danger will subside. It will once again be safe to sit by the ocean. But for now, “Move your fucking chairs.”

The desperate, anxious, helpless feeling is familiar.

The knowing that danger lurks. The desire to ignore it. The inability to forget. The constant internal struggle to relax, let go, enjoy, savor, trust. There is no relaxing when the rising tide threatens to wash away your children.

I know how to do this. Be aware of the danger. Stay vigilant. Keep calm. Stay silent. Shield others. Like an elephant, standing watch over her herd.

I think perhaps I live my life as an elephant, a sacred role for which I ‘m grateful. But the current state of affairs is overwhelming. My herd has grown. It’s no longer possible to round them up into a circle I can contain.

I can’t move all of their chairs.

Instead, for just a moment, I’d like to be a dandelion, roots reaching deep into the earth, grounding, nourishing, sustaining, and steady. My bright yellow face soaking up the sun in the middle of a mountain meadow, far from the reach of the ocean waves.

Nearby, I watch my children lounge on blankets under the shade of age old trees. The sound of laughter fills the atmosphere with life that I soak in through deep green leaves and release back to them with gratitude.

In the distance, my grandchildren run, climb, and squeal with joy. They grasp the wispy seed fluffs of the dandelion plant and with deep full breaths, make wish after wish. Filling the universe with childlike innocence and hope for a brighter day.

This pandemic is exhausting. The elephant in me is tired.

Today, I choose dandelions.

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2020/04/thoughts-in-a-pandemic-elephant-or-dandelion/

 

 

Recently my grandbaby sat in a highchair for the first time. I snapped a photo and sent it to his dad.

He texted back, “My heart needs a break!!”

I thought, “Hold on tight baby boy. That feeling never goes away.”

The saying goes, “Being a parent is like watching your heart walk around outside your body,” but it’s more than that. It’s a constant feeling that life is happening at warp speed and you’re desperate to find the pause button. Except for those days following sleepless nights, if only those days would speed quickly by so you could catch a few hours of precious sleep then things could slow down again, but even those days are treasured in hindsight.

Being a parent is having your heart stretched wider and wider. It’s thinking you couldn’t possibly love someone more and the next moment you realize in fact you do. It’s a constant opening and growing, not always of our own choosing. Seldom is there time to relax comfortably in the space of our growth before the next life event happens. One day you’re holding this helpless little human and the next day he’s sitting in a highchair and banging his spoon on the table.

Precious moments come and go and you will your brain to remember them all. The way his little body curls around my middle when he falls asleep in my lap. The pudge of his checks and the rolls on his thighs, the feel of his little hands when he grabs my face and plants an open mouth slobbery kiss on my checks, that flirty little smile as he pulls away and laughs, all of it you hope to remember in detail but deep down realize you won’t. Perhaps we aren’t meant to.

Imagine if we were capable of storing every little detail, our minds would soon become too cluttered with the past to be present in the now and what a shame that would be. Imagine a home overfilled with stuff, floor to ceiling stacks of memorabilia, shelves piled high with papers, pictures, trophies, magazines and newspapers all saved in an effort not to forget some special moment in the past. Eventually, the home becomes so filled with things there is no space left to enjoy the company of people, to sit and talk, to laugh and play, no space for living, only space for holding memories. Occasionally, our homes need to be de-cluttered so we have room to make new memories. Perhaps our minds are like this too.

With age, I’ve come to know the reality that I will not remember every little detail and so I find myself slowing down, listening harder, noticing more. In the moment, I am more present because I understand that I won’t be able to easily retrieve these memories in years to come. The present moment is a gift that will only be unwrapped once and I want to savor every layer of its essence, immersing myself in its beauty, and living only in the now of it all. I believe being fully present has the power to transform mental memory into soul memory. What my mind may not remember, my soul will never forget. Years from now, I may not remember the words that were spoken but I will know the love that was shared because I sat quietly with my heart open wide and allowed it to soak deeply into my soul. This is as close to a pause button as you’re ever going to find.