Mindfulness

Yesterday I was walking back from the hospital at the Charles/MGH T station and all of a sudden a lady walked into me so hard that I almost fell backwards, my shoes flew off, and I felt as if the wind was knocked out of me as I yelped out loud from my loss of balance. Although she apologized profusely, I was still annoyed, upset, and embarrassed. The thing is, this lady is like most others I encounter on the streets: way too busy with themselves (or their phones) to acknowledge that anyone or anything else exists in their periphery. No one is a bad person, and I've certainly been guilty of this too, but it has become the cultural normality to ignore everything and everyone currently around us as we are too wrapped up in our own electronic worlds. What strikes me as unusual is that in our eagerness to communicate with those not in the present, we choose to ignore ourselves and those around us in the present moment. By default we miss out on some great things and truth-be-told our ancient predecessors would've been eaten alive by saber toothed-tigers if they carried themselves in the unaware manner as most of us do. It takes a lot to shake us up these days. To keep us in the present moment. We forget to acknowledge that the person next to us is also special, or that the grass has grown to a lovely shade of green, or the water on the river is glistening from the sun. We forget to live and we forget what's important. I recently started going to open meditation practice at the Cambridge meditation center in central square (fabulous, by the way, I highly recommend.) If, for nothing else, I get at least 1 hour per week where I acknowledge the sounds around me, steer clear of anxiety from the past or future, and just sit and stay in the present moment and practice mindfulness. I encourage all of you to maybe take a minute today and look around you. Listen to the sounds, don't think about what you have to do or who you have to meet, and just stay in the moment. You might feel better, I know I do. Perhaps if the lady at the T station practiced some mindfulness this whole incident could've been avoided. Then again, she did give me some good material for my second blog post.