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.