BEHAVIOUR

There’s A Big Beautiful World Out There

Spend too much time in your head and you miss what’s really going on

It’s alarming how much time I can spend in my head. Driving to Intermarche, I’m vaguely aware that the vineyards have been harvested, I notice that the car behind is drawing closer and will probably try to overtake me, but mostly I’m replaying a conversation from a couple of hours ago. I run the tape a few times, pick out certain words, come up with a response I wish I’d made, decide what I’m going to do about it, weigh the pros and cons of doing nothing, and on and on.

Mornings, eyes hardly open, I reach for my phone. E-mails first, I skim through them until one merits a second look and, possibly, depending on the content, takes up residence in my brain for a few hours. The news can do that too. Climate change, the rightwing press, politics. Hours pass, my head full of this and that. As I walk through my small French village, I’m mentally back in the United States imagining the hell if a convicted former president gets back into office.

Or maybe, still back in the States, it’s my son who seldom communicates or my daughter who does and wants to quit her job. Whatever it is, I’m no longer fully aware of what’s going on around me. I might feel warm or cold, or observe a man, baguette under his arm, standing in the doorway of the village cafe, but it’s all vague and soft focus, nowhere near as attention-grabbing as what’s happening in my head.

Buddhist nun Pema Chodron knows all about this sort of behaviour. “From the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night,” she writes, “You could be completely distracted by the details of your life.”

“Maybe you are already caught up in the work you have to do that day, the projects you haven’t finished from the day before. Maybe you worry about something that has to be done or hasn’t been done or a letter that you just received. Maybe you are caught up in busy mind, caught up in hesitation or fear, depression or discouragement. In other words, you’ve gone into your cocoon.”

Tell me about it, Pema. The cocoon is my second home. Sometimes, when thoughts are pleasant, or creative ideas are hatching, it’s not a bad place to be. The problem is when it becomes dark and negative and turns claustrophobic. And when I realise that, for one reason or another, I’ve spent more time than usual hanging out in there — days, weeks, months even. There must be a better place to be.

Pema is 87 — a few years older than I am, but not so much so that her words don’t resonate.

“At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time.” Pema Chodron-

In other words when you don’t have a lot of time left, or even if you do, try climbing out of your mental cocoon and, as Chodron puts it, “wake up to the magic and vastness of the world around you.”

I know this is sound advice — I’ve written about finding awe in everyday things. I’ve even tried to do it, with varying degrees of success, but everyday things can also give rise to anger, fear, resentment — the whole panoply of negatives and it’s often difficult to appreciate much else but crawling back into the cocoon.

Or as Pema writes in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, “We come to the place where we think we can’t handle whatever is happening. It’s too much. It’s gone too far. No matter how hard we try, it just won’t work.” You’ve reached the point, she says, where you have no choice “except to embrace what’s happening or push it away.”

Unresolved, but not forgotten and playing in an endless mental loop.

So what to do about it? How do you spend less time in the mental cocoon? If you’ve ever been on the London underground, you’ve probably heard the warning, “Mind The Gap.” Pema talks about minding a different sort of gap.

“When we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies,” she writes, or when something triggers us and sends us running for the cocoon, stop and take a few deep breaths. In that way, you create a gap. A moment of calm where perhaps some fresh air can enter.

Meditation is, of course, a good way to create that gap.

Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate.

I’ve tried over the years to meditate, but as Pema warns, found myself wandering off into the recesses of my mind. But I think it’s worth another try. And it’s not even necessary to actually create the gap — Chodron explains that it already exists in our environment.

In the air and the wind, in the sea, in the land, in the animals — but how often are we actually in touch with it? Are we poking our heads out of our cocoons long enough to actually experience it?

Good question.