This post is about habituated ways of being that we can get into--all kinds. My awareness of how easy it is to fall into habits traces back to when I was exposed to Henry David Thoreau. He wrote that less than a week after he moved to Walden "my feet wore a path from my door to the pondside." More recently Jon Kabat-Zinn popularized the term "automatic pilot" and how much of our life is spent on automatic pilot.
There are many aspects of this phenomenon, from eating the same breakfast every single day, to greeting family and friends with the same, automatic greeting, to telling ourselves the same stories about ourselves, our friends and family, and the world.
I encountered the "same old story" aspect a month ago. The teacher, in a memoir class I was taking, had said that if a thought or an experience is not coming out in one form to try another form, for example, switching from prose to poetry. My first and second thought was "I don't write poetry."
Less than a week later, during the course of a morning I had several insights about my relationship to my life and I began writing about the morning. My writing felt fairly pedantic and I remembered what my teacher had said. So I paused for a few minutes, reflected on the experiences of the morning. Then I started writing--phrases, images, bits and pieces.
What came out captured my insights and what I had experienced far better than my prose had. The long title of the poem below is Why I practice mindfulness: A work in progress.
Waking up
Waking up this morning exhausted
Yesterday with my infant grandson all day and this heat is oppressive
Letting go of taking a short bike ride and finishing an essay for a workshop
Space now for meditating
Too tired to sit on my cushion
Sitting in the recliner
Mind racing with the never ending
To Do list before I leave tomorrow
Breathing in, breathing out, in, out...
Feeling a contractedness in my chest
Breathing into that tight energy and I feel it soften
Breathing in, breathing out, in, out...
Suddenly realize I forgot my morning meds
Damn, have to take them lest I forget
Slow down Tom
Decide to include taking my meds as part of the meditation
Getting up slowly, feeling my leg muscles engage as I start to stand up
Feeling my arm muscles engage as I push myself up
Walking slowly, feeling the bottoms of my feet with every step
Picking up the meds, counting them to make sure
Drinking the water slowly
Walking back to my chair
Feeling leg and arm muscles engage again as I sit down
Pausing now as I realize I am typing this fast; in, out, in, out...Back into a quieter, calmer mode. Ahhh.
Later, walking to the Ashuelot River path near my house
Noticing a quaking aspen
Looking closer
Not all the leaves are shaking
Some leaves are rustling with the very light wind,
Some whole sections of the tree are quaking
Standing back and seeing the whole aspen with a softer gaze
Amazing!
How have I not noticed this before?
One take away for me from this experience is the value of bringing mindful attention to behaviors that my heart is calling out to me about. If the attention is mindful, I don't have to deliberate whether I'm OK with this habit--my body and my heart tell me clearly!