Tag: Present moment

Me, a Saint?

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The Pope is in England for the start of the process of making John Henry Newman a “saint”. Newman was a good man and a very fine thinker, personalifying a gentle, open-minded search for truth. The school I went to in Ireland,  founded in 1867, was influenced by his principles of education. Most wisdom traditions hold up examples of people wo can act as an encouragement to us, such as the Bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition or the Saints in the Catholic and Orthodox history. Sometimes, however, the focus is on their extraordinary deeds which can lead us into thinking that full contentment is only to be found there. In this light, I like this quote from Thomas Merton:

For me to be a saint means to be myself.

Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is,  in fact,

the problem of finding our who I am and discovering my true self.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Why we miss real understanding

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When time is reduced to linear progress,

it is emptied of presence.

John O’Donoghue

It’s not out there

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We have a habit of looking in the wrong place for contentment. We tend to look outside ourselves, seeing others’ lives and other places as possessing a greater level of happiness than we currently possess. This often leads us to instinctively compare, provoking a movement within us that happens in a flash and then prompts the telling of a story about ourselves and about life, which leads to our mood going down. As I have written before, we end up comparing our present self to a better self, or to the ideal portrayal of lives which we find in society or which our insecurities about ourselves have generated. We find that a lot of our anxieties arise because we are trying to match up to what we think our life “should” be like, or what others portray as being happy.

It is easy to fall into this trap when we travel. We see a different from of life, maybe faster and more “exciting” than our own, or houses situated in a better location, or places of quiet that seem much more peaceful than where we live. So we lean towards those things, or we leave ourselves, not realizing that true contentment is found within. We get caught in idealized views of what is possible for ourselves and travel far in our minds and in our spirits from where we actually are. And this often means we end up thinking that something must be wrong with our  lives or with us.

Meditation practice is a training in learning to stay, staying with ourselves, not running outside ourselves after every passing stimulus about things which will pass away. It helps us to not attach too much solidity to these comparing thoughts, letting them pass through our minds without hooking on to them. We realize that they do not bring the contentment they seem to suggest. It helps us seek real happiness within, where we already are.

The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely…is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or…learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Letting the mind settle

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Do you have patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?

Lao Tzu

Being mindful of scrambled eggs

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The practice is quite simple really. It is to pay attention to each moment as it actually is, and be open to whatever is happening in that moment.  It is not about creating a sense of calm or fixing our personalities. It is not about changing things at all, in one sense, but rather being with them in the light of awareness.

Seems simple. However, I continually find that it is not so easy to keep the mind focused on just this moment or this act. It often prefers to race ahead, thinking about what needs to be said or scanning the horizon for the next task to be done. I got a simple example of that this week. I was standing in line to get breakfast and was putting some food on the plate. I came to the last of the hot items, scrambled eggs, and put them on my plate, looking ahead to see where to get coffee and where to sit. Jenn’s voice from behind came, saying, “Thanks Karl for taking all the eggs“, which indeed I had. Leaning into the next moment – where to sit – or being busy composing an answer in a conversation,  meant that I had filled my plate without noticing and consequently without considering others. Luckily,  Jenn was kind enough to allow me make amends and to accept some of the portion I had put on my plate ……even though she could not help reminding me of it for the next few days.

When we don’t pay attention to this moment we can notice our minds speeding up to already be in the next. We also fail to pay attention to the deeper possibilities of caring for or listening to others.  Mindfulness is sterile if it does not lead us to being more compassionate, more sensitive. A simple lesson, which we have to learn over and over again, hundreds of times each day.

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and the world around us.

Jon Kabat Zinn

It’s quite simple really

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I spoke to my mother on the phone this afternoon. I had missed her call earlier in the week when she had hoped to persuade me to come home for a visit. And when she expressed that wish today I had to decline,  due to a busy schedule in the next weeks. She was disappointed and so I listened,  as best I could, providing a presence across the phone.  She spoke of the things of her day and the up’s and down’s of her week. Mainly simple things, a way of masking greater concerns. My job was to be silent. No greater work for those moments.

Ironically this week I had thought of helping in a bigger way. Sometimes I can think that life and support means grand gestures, a greater endeavour. And I spend my time planning for that in the future, to reach out more. However, what I realize this weekend is that the bigger picture can easily distract and become a way of avoiding. Even something as simple as kindness can take on  proportions that are not human. It misses the real family member who needs us. And then it is no longer love but rather our own day dreams pulling us away.

Real love encourages us to embrace the ordinariness of life. Whatever so distracts us from seeing and loving the familiar of the daily has the potential to be unhealthy. These distractions can appear in all shapes and sizes, many of them wholesome aspirations. However, they put our hopes for life elsewhere – on some shelf we may never reach – and pull us away from what is under our noses.

What is love? It is such a deep need of the human heart. Can it be as simple as being present to one another as fully as we can? I remember speaking to an old monk in Ireland once, who told me that life was quite straightforward really. It consisted of loving, he said, to the best of our ability, those whom we encountered each day. The people who were in our life at that moment.  Most of our days offer these simple encounters, little things –  dropping people off at the airport, making lunch and telling each other that things will work out. Maybe that is the essence of this life that I love – we are here,  we have each other, and do the best we can with what little time we are given. No dramatic gestures, no spectacular love, just ordinary stuff like partners, friends, mothers, sisters, phone calls and listening in silence.