Worthwhile Living

I just finished a great book, “The Curse of Chalion”, that was not only a great read in the “speculative fiction” (fantasy) genre, but had a lot of bonus spiritual insights. The following quote is one of those.

Cazaril’s attention was arrested by a pebble that lay on the pavement near his knee. It was so dense. So persistent. The gods could not lift so much as a feather, but he, a mere human, might pick up this ancient unchanging object and place it wherever he wished, even into his pocket. He wondered why he had never apprecaiated the stubborn fidelity of matter. A dried leaf lay nearby, even more stunning in its complexity. Matter invented so many forms, and then went on to generate beauty beyond itself, minds and souls rising up out of it like melody from an instrument … matter was an amazement to the gods. Matter remembered itself so very clearly. He could not think why he had failed to notice it before. His own shaking hand was a miracle, as was the fine metal sword in his belly, and the orange trees in the tubs–one was tipped over now, wonderfully fractured and spilling–and the tubs, and the birdsong starting in the morning, and the water–water! Five gods, water!–in the fountain, and the morning light filtering into the sky…

Cazaril ignored it all, taken up with his pebble again. He wondered where it had come from, how it had arrived there. What it had been before it was a pebble. A rock? A mountain? Where? For how many years? It filled his mind. And if a pebble could fill his mind, what might a mountain do? The gods held mountains in their minds, and all else besides, all at once. Everything, with the same attention he gave to one thing. He had seen that, through the Lady’s eyes. If it had endured for longer than that infinitesimal blink, he thought his soul would have burst. As it was he felt strangely stretched. Had that glimpse been a gift or just a careless chance?

This, to me, is a wonderful description of what “mindfulness” is supposed to be. Being intensely aware of a single thing, and not just of the thing, but of where it came from, what it affects … where does this one thing fit into the great web of interbeing? In meditation this is one of the reasons you might concentrate on your breath. It’s not just to feel yourself breathing, but to be intensely aware of the air moving in and out of your body. There are meditative exercises that make it feel like the universe is breathing you, instead of you breathing the air (and of course that might be how it works ). When you do walking meditation, you relate to the earth beneath your feet in a much different way that you do when you are walking normally.

Of course, formal meditation is just the practice so that we can learn to live each moment that way, not just while on the cushion. We also practice so we can extend our awareness beyond the breath and beyond a single thing, on to all things.

Mindfulness of this sort reminds us that every thing, and every moment, is a miracle. Endeavor to take nothing for granted.

“The Curse of Chalion” (Lois McMaster Bujold)

Technorati Tags: Meditation, Mindfulness

We all do things because we’ve always done them that way. Or maybe because that’s the way our parents did it when we were growing up. Seth Godin, on his blog, posted about some things we do today that are relics of some reason that’s now obsolete.

This reminds me of one of my favorite “make you think” stories:

A newly-wed couple was making their first dinner of roast beef together. The wife proceeded to take the roast and cut off one end before she put it into the oven. She wrapped the extra piece up and put it in the fridge. The husband asked why?

She said she didn’t know but that she’d always done it that way because her mother did it that way. The husband says, “that’s crazy, why would you cut off a perfectly good piece of meat and not cook it? Let’s call your mother and ask.”

So they call the wife’s mother. She says, “I don’t know why we cut the end of the roast off. I’ve always done it that way, because my mother always did it that way.”

So they call the wife’s grandmother. She says, “I don’t know why we cut the end of the roast off. I’ve always done it that way, because my mother always did it that way.”

Luckily, the wife’s great-grandmother is still alive. They call her in the nursing home and ask why, for generations, these families have cut the end of the roast beef off before cooking it. She says, “that’s simple. When I was cooking roasts, I didn’t have a big enough pan, so I cut off part of the roast so it would fit.”

One of the goals of mindfulness is to “look deeply” at everything. That includes looking at the reasons you do things. Next time you’re doing something (anything! everything!), look deeply at why you’re doing it, or why you are doing it in that way. You might just discover that you’re being controlled by people and justifications long gone. Make sure you have a reason for everything you do. Do you like those reasons?

Here’s testament to being able to find inspiration in unlikely places. I was listening to the Bob Edwards Show on a podcast (via Audible) and heard him talking with the author of a book called “Last Dance in Havana”

The author read an excerpt of the book that struck me as a description of how the universe might work. Perhaps we’re all a part of some greater action, some large-scale existence that we cannot possibly grasp or even know about, but still we’re an integral part of it. And more, each of our actions and non-actions are connected to everyone else and are a necessary part of the whole. Nothing is unimportant, everything matters and affects everything else. As Dan Millman says, “there are no ordinary moments.”

It’s not unlike how our own bodies work. Each cell has its own existence, it’s own job. But none of the individual cells has any idea of the larger concept: that it is part of a working whole we call the body. It takes all of the cells, working together, to create our body and our existence. Like that, maybe, our individual existences, along with the existence of everything else is creating something…

This notion was even mentioned, albeit tongue-in-cheek in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the earth, and all of its inhabitants, is essentially a big computer. And it’s very much contained in Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of Interbeing.

But if we cannot conceive of that which we contribute to, how does this have any effect on us? For me, it has these implications, which I try to put into practice:

• Everything I do is important. Every moment is significant. There are no ordinary moments. Therefore, be mindful of every moment.
• The roles we play are important to the larger whole. Therefore I should fill that role to the best of my ability.
• Nothing I do is so significant that everything depends on it, nor is anything I do so insignificant that I should discount it. Therefore, I try not to be devastated when things seem to go wrong, nor do I become bored when I seem to be doing the “same old thing”, neither do I think myself so important when I have achieved something — just enjoy being a part of the interplay, whatever happens.
• Everything is connected to everything else in some subtle, and not so subtle ways. Therefore, look deeply to see those connections, however slight: How is something that I’m doing now going to affect my family, my neighbor, someone half the world away, someone 100 years from now, etc.
• We only exist for, and because of, our connection to other things (people, animals, plants, minerals … everything!). Therefore, seek to understand those connections and strengthen them.

Of course the book had nothing to do with any of this, but almost as proof of this concept it was in there. Here’s the excerpt:

Across the extent of this huge space, filling it to capacity and beyond, couples were dancing. But dancing does not begin to tell what they were doing. They were whipping, They were twirling. They were circling, diving beneath locked arms, embracing. They were bumping, grinding, releasing, spinning, caressing, all but making love. They were doing all those things in a dense crowd, somehow coordinating their moves so that whenever a man swung his partner toward a given point on the floor, the man or woman in the neighboring couple who was occupying that space somehow moved out of the way just in time, gracefully shifting into another space that a millisecond earlier had likewise been magically vacated.

At first it looked to me as if some higher intelligence were guiding the movements of each of these hundreds of people. But then, as I continued to watch, another metaphor took over. This was an exercise in massively parallel computation. Many minds, each solving its own bit of an otherwise unsolvable problem. No one genius could have attended to so many vital details so perfectly. This group movement was decentralized but coordinated, almost like flocking or schooling but not at all instinctive, not in the least bit unconscious. It was brilliantly human, and clever, both spontaneous and purposeful, and it was one of the most stirring and beautiful sights I have ever seen.

“Last Dance in Havana” (Eugene Robinson)