Back to the Basics

After a tedious search, my friend had finally found the perfect drapes for a hard-to-fit set of windows. They needed to be hemmed, so she waited patiently through wedding season for an appointment with a talented sewing wizard. They hung the drapes, but when my friend stepped back to admire them, she noticed they had been shortened too much. A three-inch strip of sun shone through her bedroom window. Not ideal for sleep. 

“I was so disappointed. I wanted to throw a tantrum. But I saw the look on her face. I just took a pause.”  

As we move into fall and the end of summer’s relentless intensity, we’re going back to the basics. Three deep breaths. Notice what you notice. Pause, breathe, repeat.  

These simple practices are the ABCs of being a decent human. But this work is the hardest to do because it takes practice, and because it requires us to overpower our programmed tendency to fire back with kneejerk reactions. 

It’s OK. We’re mere mortals, after all, and our “untrained” brains act more like the lazy teenager than the grown up we are capable of being. Left to its own devices, our brains take shortcuts, cut corners to save energy, jump to conclusions. It’s trying to be efficient, but when we level up by inserting a pause, our responses are much higher quality. We don’t have to spend so much time cleaning up the aftermath. 

When my friend turned away from the disappointingly clad window, she paused long enough to notice the resignation on the seamstress’s face, the expectation that a verbal dressing down was coming. 

“They’re just curtains,” my friend told her, realizing she meant it.   

Mindfulness practice reminds us to pay attention to the fact that approaching each other with decency, humanity, and fairness is the more important thing.  

Back to the basics. Use your attention to notice when you can show up, fully human, and recognize the humanity in others. That’s one way to keep things local.

With three deep breaths,

Sara