THE BENEFITS OF MINDFULNESS ON THE SOUL AND THE MIND

I was in the middle of reading Coxhead and Jayasuriya (2008) for my background chapter on the Philippines, but felt a stronger urge to write about my day, instead, because of a girl talking animatedly to her mother in the Cuba Café.

The Gift of a Chance Meeting

The temperatures in Palmy have certainly fluctuated. As told by a local, the fall weather should be coming to a close these present months to send the entire country spinning into winter here below the equator, but that autumn should be much colder than it has been. In contradiction to this testimony, the climate has more like lumbered towards winter, an almost grudging transition that features warm and sunny days, but at sundown when the valley is blanketed by darkness the air gets a refrigerator chill, buttressed by a wind that flushes repeatedly across the city. In the evenings, my flat goes bleak and I pull out the layers of bed clothes and socks, and attempt to stay warm as I read at my desk beneath a dimming light bulb. On such nights, I crave a crackling hearth to stay warm.

After a failed attempt to notarize two statutory of declarations at the Courthouse by the Square, I decided to duck into the city library and came upon two books deep in the social science section, which might be interesting – nonfictions about Jackie Kennedy and the other about being a Bhutto by the niece of Benazir Bhutto, slain Prime Minister of Pakistan. I don’t know whether I’ll finish either one, but I like to have non-academic writing around that might serve as guilty pleasure.

Later, I stopped into the Cuba Café on George Street to linger over a latte and some other readings that I had put aside in order to concentrate on more pressing matters. And no, I don’t refer here to blogging. My mind stepped in and out of the reading, though, and found a few, disjointed stray thoughts (mine) materializing into spoken words (also mine) in the Café. In between these not-so-mindful mutterings, a girl’s voice floated into my stream of consciousness from the next table over. She talked about her day to her mother. Though my ears could catch only very stray bits of what she was saying, I discerned that she was giving an account of something in her day that was perhaps troubling to her. I was enamored by the simplicity of her world – the one she experiences as a child – and almost envied the way her world revolved around encumbrances equaling a jug of milk that had toppled over. And, though the issues involved might have been gargantuan in her eyes, in fact they were not. I liked knowing this truth about her reality, a secret all adults know about a child’s life but don’t share with the child. Understanding the scale of her worries also minimizes the circumference of the scale of pressures affecting me. At that precise moment, her world became mine; all my worries disappeared and I was simply sitting at a coffee table taking notes on readings, sipping a latte, and enjoying the amicability of the cafe atmosphere.

This distant interaction between two strangers reminded me of the mindfulness skills my learning group discussed at the Stress Less workshop earlier on Friday afternoon, reinforcing the idea that the simplicity on which all relationships should be built could eliminate the complexities that people create in their minds, project into their spheres of influence that entangle people who may not want to be tethered in them. However, for whatever reasons, as children become adults, complications become more frequent and ever increasingly bigger, and has the unfortunate effect of creating big children who are 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old.  

She, the affecting girl in the café, reminds that complications are the result of our own machinations and untangling them before they’re projected into unmanageable monsters can eliminate unnecessary problems within and around our spheres of influence. This girl was my food for thought for the week and was the reason for today’s blog.         

ONE SLOW SUNDAY

Another evening of light drizzle after hours of clear blue skies, interrupted only by occasional patches of grey clouds, has worked its way yet again into the valleys of Palmerston North. The cadence of rainfall, sounding like applause after a performance, heightens in crescendo in tempo with the breath of the universe just outside the window. The still air brings the smell of rain into this elongated office in the geography building through the slight crack in the window pane.  

As I walked the short distance from my temporary flat to the office, the Tararua mountain range discernible at the distant outskirts of the valley in the blue, dusk light silently beckoned to me, daring me to ascend. Although the undulating peaks are a temptation, especially on this day after spending several hours reading indoors, the possible tramping excursion remained just that, a temptation and a thought, which I tucked away in the back of my mind as part of my list-of-things to do while in New Zealand. And certainly not on this quiet early evening, I’m afraid, as fears of receding into this uncertain abyss if the readings that demand to be completed became part of my academic worries. Unread pages of books and articles often call out to me during this academic life, like subconscious drones at the base of my mind. Before I can even begin typing out the tentative sentences that would in time dutifully unfold into the background chapter of Bukidnon Province, I had to complete those readings.

Moving around the city and campus, stepping into this errand or that workshop, is a bit like entering tiny vignettes that contain a beginning, a climax, and an ending, each story isolated from the other, as if I were playing out different, disjointed parts of my life. Each vignette differs in length of time and always concludes with a curtain call for another appearance. Other stories are but a few hours and require only a short appearance, while others are continuous. Some also give me the feeling of being controlled by another force belonging in another psychological realm that I can’t see or recognize, and so I work with the tug of the strings, but am not really certain if the footing is secure enough for me to continue balancing on it. These occasions render the unsettling sensation of standing on a scaffold, which holds no permanence or represents little security.

The occasional vignette will bring me face-to-face with such an overwhelming pleasantness that I feel grateful for it having migrated clandestinely into my uneventful days. One in particular was the needed resolution to an unplanned expense that it caused some anxiety because I feared the outcome of not being able to afford the care. The solution was accompanied by the kindness that upon discovery proved to bring together these fissures that required mending. The smell of jasmine in the evening air in the late, New England summer – the memory of this vignette parallels the other – the solution to which I refer, the one who comes every mid-week to campus or is worth the visit on Broadway Avenue. Even just once to relieve the underlying discomfort.

Monday evening will be one spent with Kelvin Cruikshank, a psychic who exists in harmony with the other side, alongside those who believe.