Awakening to All of Living
The assignment of being a human is serious business. “It’s no joke here,” a friend recently observed – to which I muttered, “This can’t be the ‘good place.’”
And here’s the thing about “awakening.” Once you choose to pay attention to your human-ness, you’re all in. You start with attention to your breath, because you’ve learned about the science of attention, that each time you focus it, even a bit, it’s like a bicep curl for the brain. So, this simple practice of paying attention to something, with the full intention of doing so, results in a stronger ability to think, pause, innovate, connect and bounce back, among other things.
Once you get better at paying attention, you begin to notice new things. All things. Not just the good things. So while your ability to create or think critically improves, your ability to see the broad spectrum of your life, including the not-so-great parts, also deepens.
As I often joke, mindfulness saved my life, gave meaning to my life, wrecked my life, and then gave me a few more lifelines. I did learn to pay attention in conversations with more empathy. I learned the power of focus, and how it fueled creativity. I also had some painful “ah-ha” moments, which was totally annoying, because, let’s face it, I was in the mindfulness gig to become calm and less stressed. I had no intention of plumbing lines of pain or grief or sorrow.
But I wonder if we miss the whole point when we chain ourselves, our kids, and society to this idea that we are relentlessly in pursuit of happiness. Anything relentless can’t really work out all that well, after all. For one thing, I’m not sure I’d choose happiness over wisdom, or happiness over creativity. I wouldn’t choose it over peace — my own or peace in the world. I want to understand things. I want to know more about why. I want to engage.
Expanding awareness means you become more aware of the gamut of emotions, the depth of suffering around you, the never-tired silhouette of the Tetons. Because you connect more deeply with those around you, you feel more deeply, too. This is tough going, when we are several years into a collective litany of things not going right, things that cause us all to grieve. This accumulation of losses – of health, of life, of our sense of safety, our assumption that the planet would always bounce back, that our society was built on a bedrock of fairness, liberty, and happiness – is a heavy one.
Robert Frost once wrote, “The best way out is always through.” I don’t know if it’s best, but I think it’s the only way you actually cross to the other side of grief or pain. You don’t get there by numbing or ignoring or denying or fighting back, be it with tanks or weaponized words. The sooner we commit to growing our awareness, the sooner we draw closer to an informed space. And that may be, after all, the good place.
