Orienting to the Ordinary
Have you ever taken a drive, parked your car, and realized you have very little memory of the ride? You can picture it if it is a familiar route. Yet the details from that ride are absent. The ride happened and you arrived safely, but the experience of the event itself seems murky or even non-existent. It’s as if life happened but was not registered in consciousness. It was not quite lived.
What about when you get to the destination? Are you suddenly more plugged in to the experience because you have “arrived?” Or is there still a kind of, what’s next momentum operating within you?
Often, we feel as though we are tumbling forward through life, propelled by some force edging us away from the present moment. Why do we do this? It may be a combination of factors, such as the pressures of society, work, parenting, learned patterns from childhood, and the survival-based design of our nervous system as a response to danger.
All these things may encourage us to constantly lean ahead, ever drifting into a world that is not here, a life that is not the one we are living. We may be evaluating ourselves in the process. Critiquing ourselves about what should have been different or elevating ourselves because of what seems to be working well in our life. Deciding what another person’s behavior means in relationship to us. Replaying a recent conversation and making tremendous meaning out of it. On some level, painting a detailed illustration of who we are and how we are doing.
From the perspective of practice, none of this is wrong. And we are not trying to “fix” a problem. Yet we do want to investigate the location and the quality of our attention, one of the few things we can shift in every moment.
Investigation is a very important word. It is our job to want to know. Not to judge. To want to know.
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To be mindful is to recognize the rarity having an authentic connection to the present moment and to admit that the present moment is all that there is.
To admit that the external world may influence our well being but it is the mind that is the seed for either happiness or suffering. To understand that if we want to become more free from stress and suffering, understanding the mind is where we can begin. This is meditation. A laboratory where the mind can become visible.
We want to begin to investigate the tendency to try to “get through” things, the “tumbling forward” energy that may arise in daily life.
Our job is to tune in and become aware of life unfolding in the only moment it can be witnessed, felt, and discovered. In the only moment the mind can become more free.
This is a tall order. We mostly forget. And then we remember. When you remember, it’s not a problem that you’ve forgotten. The remembering is the practice, the waking up.
