Calm Up

My head is a strange place to live.  I suspect my brain doesn't function the same way as most brains.  I tend to notice and remember the smallest of details, the way sun bounces off the one white branch on the tree behind our house, how a client I met only once a couple of years ago, takes her coffee or the day and hour of the party where I met a new friend ten years ago.  It would be great if my mind worked like that all the time but alas, I seem to be unable to pick and choose the trivia it notices and stores.  I regularly lose my car in parking garages.  I often scramble to recall the name of someone I've met several times and I can rarely recall where I have set down my phone or my keys and I still need to rely on my GPS to get me to places I've driven to a half dozen times.  The one thing I have consistently been able to do though, is get immersed and stay immersed to the end of a project or activity.  Sometimes, my biggest challenge is to tear myself away from whatever has caught my interest.  I want to indulge in making one more bracelet or reading one more chapter or I pick up my paintbrush to do just a few more strokes even though I have already changed out of my painting clothes.

This period of isolation has changed all our lives. I talk to my friends about their heightened levels of anxiety, their fears and worries.  I listen to them talk about cleaning their closets and storerooms for hours on end.  They rake and dig and prune in their gardens.  They are rereading the classics.  I'm happy for them that they have found these coping mechanisms but isolation hasn't quite worked that way for me.  I have found myself so distracted that I struggle to accomplish any project.  I am the voracious reader who has been unable to sit and read a single chapter, the painter who loses interest after a few strokes, the cook who became so distracted while making jam a couple of weeks ago, that I burned the bottom of my favourite pot.  And worst of all, no matter how I tried, I couldn't seem to do anything about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I started taking a mindfulness meditation class.  I tried to stay mindful through the guided meditation but my mind wasn't having it.  I retreated to a sad place and cried through the whole meditation.  The second time, I was so focused on holding myself together that I couldn't surrender to the moment.  The third was better.  My mind did wander but I was able to pull myself back to the moment most of the time.  The day after class three, I woke up with an epiphany.  I was trying to use meditation as a way to calm down when in fact it would serve me better to use it as a way to calm up.  Dealing with anxiety and uncertainty are not my issues.  I'm not distracted because I am afraid, I am distracted because I've stopped finding the small joys in the things I do.  For me, it's about finding more joy, not less fear.

On Saturday, I made a big batch of mixed berry jam.  I focused on the sweet aroma of the berries as they blended in the pot, on how the shine of the mixture changes as it transforms from berries to jam. I made bread and savoured the aroma in my kitchen as it baked, it's crust becoming golden.  I made pea soup with the recipe taught to me by my mother many years ago, remembering the soup pot that simmered on the stove top in my childhood home.  I noticed the beauty of the colourful vegetables that I evenly chopped to make a big pot of vegetable chili, the rich red of the tomatoes, vibrant orange of the carrots, crisp greens and yellows of the beans and delicate hues of the mushrooms.  I appreciated the pungent odors of the onions, not even minding the way they made my eyes sting.  After all my cooking and cleaning were done, I retreated to a quiet room to knit a shawl I wanted to finish for a friend's birthday the next day.  It has been a challenging project for me - one that I had been trying to finish for nearly two months without success. Somehow I was able to work at it without distraction.  I noticed the softness of the yarn in my hands and the coolness of my knitting loom.  I counted each stitch and watched with satisfaction as the shawl grew, flowing out from the bottom of the loom.  By the end of the day, I was calmer and happier than I have been in weeks.  I have calmed up.

What is So Good About It?

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." - Mother Theresa

In any other year, I would be busy today preparing for Good Friday dinner.  It is our annual tradition to host all the family on Good Friday.  No matter what is happening in our lives, Good Friday dinner happens.  This year, I planned an Australian-themed dinner, but as with everything else in this strange time - the best laid plans...

It is a sacred time in the world for many of faith.  Christians are celebrating Easter.  Jews are celebrating Passover.  Ramadan begins in a couple of weeks.  But there is no church, no synagogue, no mosque open to house the collected faithful.  Whether or not you believe in any religion or even in any deity, most of us can agree this is a sacred time in the world.  Spring is the season of hope as we watch the earth renew itself, proof of conquered death with each new leaf and bud.  But unlike other springs, though the trees are budding and the snowdrops are blooming in the garden, I am sensing little hope in the air but the energy of fear is palpable.  So much of my communication is now limited to technology - emails, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Messenger and Zoom.  It's not normal.  There are no hugs, no intimacies, but an endless stream of memes, rants and dire stories.  There are some laughs and some pictures sharing the beauty of art and nature too but it is the ranting that jars my psyche.  Otherwise kind people are posting an endless stream of complaints and judgements against their neighbours and those they meet at the grocery stores and watch in the line-ups at the pharmacy.  They are posting pictures to shame people standing too closely or allowing their children to play in the closed parks or filling their supermarket carts with more than they are judged to need.  And while there will always be idiots who will break the rules, no matter what they are, perhaps posting our rage and attempting to shame them is not the best way to bring them into the compliance tent.

Perhaps we would get better results if we start with the assumption that everyone is doing the best they can right now.  People are afraid.  Maybe the mom whose kids are playing in the park is at the end of her tether and it is safer for her kids to be in the park than it is for them to be in her home where she is one short breath from hitting them.  Maybe the guy in the grocery store with the too full cart is cooking for the elderly and vulnerable people in his apartment building.  Maybe the woman who is standing too close is just so lonely and isolated that she is pulled to drift into contact with another person.  Maybe your uncle who keeps saying that our isolation actions are over-reactions needs to keep telling himself that because it is the only way he can get through the day. Maybe we could use our intellect and energy to figure out if there is something we can do to help, to transform their pain and fear into hope.

These are my thoughts on a day I would rather be setting the table and baking the fish to feed my family - an annual act of love.  But on this Good Friday, it is an act of love to leave our table empty so that next Good Friday, we will all still be here to share our meal, to hug and laugh and love.