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.