Mindfulness in Troubled Times
There are now two worlds that we will identify in our lifetime- BC (Before Corona) and AD- (After the Disease) and I’ve heard talk of calendars almost going back to 1 from April 2020. This may not happen physically, but make no mistake the world as we knew it is over, and we face a new dawn.
One of the opportunities of this lockdown time is to consciously re-evaluate our life, Mindfully. The reason why the present is called a gift is that it’s the only moment we have. There are only two unimportant days in your life- one is yesterday and the other is tomorrow. We can’t make any impact in those moments- yet it’s so interesting how much time we spend feeling guilt or regret about past, or constantly worrying about the future, as the present moment is the only moment where we can make an impact.
If we don’t pay attention or are constantly on our phones, then we miss that moment. In my presentation, I tell a story about a professor at UCT, who in 2008 had to unexpectedly take his 18-month-old child to school. His wife normally took the child, but this particular morning she had a meeting. This father was so busy thinking about his day, and the child had fallen asleep in the back of the car that he drove straight past the nursery school. He parked his car in the lecturers' car park at UCT and went off to deliver his lecture, forgetting about the child in the back of the car. Two hours later the alarm was raised, and people rushed to the car where the child was found dead in 46-degree heat in the back seat. It is the most awful story of someone paying the ultimate price for mindlessness. When his students were interviewed about the lecturer they commented “He was always busy, always rushing” “He was very forgetful and always busy.” There were signs that his life was out of control before this awful incident happened.
I believe that life is like a dashboard, where just as your car dashboard communicates when you’re running out of petrol or your tyres are running low, life whispers to us as well. If we pay mindful attention to those dashboards then we notice things before they become full-blown crises I’ve realised through this work that we don’t lose our health overnight- when I did this presentation for a group of cardiologists they told me that no-one has a heart attack without having a symptom at least a year before, That symptom is often heartburn or reflux. We don’t lose our marriages overnight- we don’t go from being in a happy fulfilled relationship to an unhappy, miserable marriage over-night. There are signs along the way, and if we are mindful we can act before these problems become insurmountable. You don’t get resignations from someone in your team overnight- that person has probably voiced their unhappiness/dissatisfaction before. When we chose to ignore these life whispers, then life starts to shout- if we’re still in denial then it starts to scream. That scream is often in the form of a health issue.
Living a mindful life is often harder and braver, as you are mindfully paying attention to all the elements of your life- the good, the bad and the ugly.
Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I would agree- when you become more mindful it’s as if you move from a black and white movie perspective, where you can’t deny or gloss over problems, to a full HD technicolour experience of your life where you notice and are more conscious of all that life has to offer- both positive and negative.
This is the gift from the Corona Virus- it’s an opportunity to re-set. Let’s use this time wisely!
Much love Helen x
