My husband and I are recovering from being sick last week and are experiencing the loss of smell and taste. While not ideal for us and most every other food-lover on the planet, I know this is temporary, and it has brought an unexpected gift.
Since there isn’t much taste as I chew my food, I am now ten times more aware of the textures and the temperatures of what I’m eating. In that sense, this symptom offers a unique mindfulness challenge, showing me to what degree I usually miss rich details about my culinary experiences.
Oatmeal, watermelon, chicken soup, fudge pie. Imagine consuming these, putting the wonderful tastes aside for a moment and noticing only their textures? It’s really quite a treat to slow down and enjoy food in a new way.
I’m wondering where else in our lives are one or two senses so dominant that we’re missing out on the fullness life has to offer?
We may unconsciously prioritize sight over hearing. I remember a therapist asking me once, “When’s the last time you heard the birds?” While at the time I thought that was a quacky question, I soon knew what he meant. I had been letting worry and fear live in my head, making so much noise that they drowned out the sounds of nature. When I intently listened for birds later than day, I heard them all around me. I’m sure I was hearing them all along, but I wasn’t listening.
We may look, but not see. We can take an ordinary scene that is part of our everyday lives, gloss over the details, and not notice when something changes. Today, I noted a new bird’s nest on top of one of our drain pipes. I say “new,” but I have no idea how long it’s been there, because in my driveway, I’m usually coming or going, not looking around and in this case, up.
The same thing happens when someone we see a lot makes an appearance change, like getting a new hair style or switching from glasses to contacts. We may recognize that something is different, but we can’t figure out what it is, and struggle to picture what they looked like the day before. How is that possible when we see them so often?
One explanation for this is multi-tasking to the point that our sense of noticing ranks less than five, on a scale of one to ten. When we are saturating our brains with so much simultaneous stimulation, nothing we’re experiencing can register very high.
Autopilot is a dangerous mode to live in. Who hasn’t gotten behind the wheel of a car and drove thirty minutes, and not remembered the drive? Yikes! We’re missing it…life that is. If we each have ninety years to live, that’s 32,850 days to observe and enjoy life on earth. I don't know about you, but over half of my time is gone and much of it was not spent paying full attention.
Presenteeism is a distant cousin to absenteeism (pun intended). In presenteeism, the body is present, but the mind is not. Stop. Slow down. Did you read what you just read? Sometimes when I’m trying to read something, I literally have to start a paragraph over five to ten times before I finally bring all of me to what I’m reading to gain comprehension. We weren’t born this way and thankfully, we can reverse the effects of multi-tasking and multi-being.
Quite simply, mindfulness is being where your body is. It’s sitting and knowing that you’re sitting. Walking and knowing that you’re walking. Eating and knowing that you’re eating. Hearing birds and knowing that you’re listening.
May I offer you a mindfulness challenge? Start a timer on your phone (or mark time on your watch) and for the next three minutes, attempt to observe everything you can in your current surroundings, noting every single time your thoughts pull you out of the moment. Notice what it’s like to come back. We are fascinating creatures and this is harder than it sounds, but I am getting better at it through practice.
For 110 days in a row now, I’ve been doing a seated mindfulness meditation practice. I try to do it as part of a mid-day break, but it just has to happen somewhere in my day. I listen to an app (Ten Percent Happier) that is instructional, but also goes back and forth between silence. This gives me a chance to practice maintaining my focus on the present moment, while navigating thoughts, sounds and anything else I might see as a distraction.
I find that the present moment is so perfect, so full of calm and contentment. I anchor that thought so I can build up more willingness to be there, or rather, be here more often. More and more, I’m incorporating staying present throughout my daily activities. For instance, when I go on a walk, I may ask myself, what does it feel like from my feet's perspective to walk on concrete? What are my toes doing when I walk? Is there a breeze on my arms? How many things do I hear right now? What's
the most interesting thing I can see? This way of walking is much more pleasant than carrying worries with me and dwelling on them.
Today, we have the opportunity to be where we are, as much as we can. To maximize the gift of another twenty-four hours. To squeeze all the life out of every experience we come across, leaving nothing unnoticed. I wish you an abundance of well-being.
