Monday Mindfulness Minute: You Can't Get it Because You Already Are it

Have you heard the story of the Musk Deer?

The deer catches a scent of something one morning early in its life and becomes obsessed with finding it. Convinced that finding this scent will fulfill its life mission, it spends each day frantically searching the valleys, mountaintops, and every corner in between, seeming always to be close but never quite reaching it. Exhausted from the search, it eventually finds itself on its deathbed. Resting for the first time, the deer pauses and, in the stillness, notices that somehow the scent remains beyond the valleys and mountains and corners. You guessed it. The scent it was chasing outside was actually coming from its own pores. It had what it was searching for.

I have been this deer many times in my life, frantically searching for the thing outside (the career/partner/vacation/friendship) that would finally bring me contentment. But collecting and grasping these externals never seemed to be enough. It's almost as if we have been convinced that these outside things are the last piece of the puzzle that will complete us.

But it turns out that we are the last piece of the puzzle. Us. Experiencing life. You see, the purpose of life isn't trying to find something outside. The purpose of life is the experience of life inside. Once we live this, the things outside will become more enjoyable because we won't be as attached to them, won't be as afraid that they keep leaving us or changing.

Monday mindfulness Minute: "Has It ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?"

Five years ago, I would have been insulted if you had asked me this question or even insinuated that I could be wrong about anything. The double whammy of growing up as an only child and being Valedictorian in high school firmly lodged the belief that I was always right deep into my psyche. As it turns out, the "skill" of memorizing and regurgitating information is far from the insanity of trying to predict the future, which is what the mind seems most preoccupied with these days.

The more I watch, the more I see that my mind is consistently and predictably wrong about the weather, what others will do, why they do what they do, whether the plan is going to work out, how long traffic is going to take, how people are going to react, whether there will be rotissere chickens left at the grocery story, whether it's going to rain 4 and a half weeks from now when I'm on vacation, why that person did what they did 3 years ago, where I would be now if I had done something different 2 years ago, how a friendship will turn out, whether the sore throat will turn out to be the first signs of a debilitating disease, and on and on and on and on.

To be fair to the mind, it's doing the best with what it has, which is a limited set of data comprised of our past experiences. It then takes this data, which is statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of everything that is happening everywhere, and comes up with an "educated" guess about what's going to happen next. The issue is not that the mind thinks, as this abstract thinking serves as the foundation for some of our greatest human discoveries, but that we take these guesses and turn them into convictions about ourselves, our lives, and (most dangerously) others. We become convicts trapped inside the limited confines of our minds when we automatically believe the first thing that comes to mind.

It turns out that “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” is not an insult but a lifeline. Asking ourselves this question, repeatedly and especially when we are convinced we are right, might be the leverage we need to crack the prison of our mind open to find our freedom beyond the endless thoughts of assumption that leave us closed to learning anything new.

I think the boy in "The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse" is onto something when he asks, "Is there a school of unlearning?" The classroom of unlearning is in session each day. If we dare to show up, we will learn to pause for a second to consider that we don't know and to embrace curiosity over certainty, asking over telling, and love over judgement.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Welp, back to Reality...

“That was an awesome trip! I can’t believe we rode 17 dolphins, drank 96 pina coladas, and saw a man blow up a condom to put on his head during a magic show.”

“Same, I just felt so alive and happy the whole time. I’m so glad we took time to get away.”

“Me too! But it's back to reality now (heavy, dramatic sigh).”

We have all been there. We experience an exciting “get away” where we seem to unplug from the world and find the peace, happiness, and contentment that somehow elude us day to day, and we dread returning to the grind of work that seems to be the exact opposite of what we want to do. On a smaller scale, this is something most of us experience every Monday morning as the number of "welp, it's back to reality" and "the weekend just wasn't long enough" pile up because of the internal monologue that convinces us we would be happy if we were doing something different somewhere else.

Our current reality has somehow morphed into a cycle of working 5 days of reality to get 2 days of "peace" and working 49 weeks a year to get 3 weeks of PTO. I'm not a math major, but that math doesn't add up. And I've lived this type of "life." Except for me, my reality was that I only enjoyed a few hours each week on Friday Night when I was in the sweet spot of being glad the weekend had arrived but was also far enough from it being over (which I immediately started fretting come Saturday morning - "Only a few more hours of freedom before it's back to the grind"). It's not a fun reality.

The reality is that the average person will experience (really dread) 4,004 Mondays in their lifetime. It's time for us to reclaim Monday as a day of celebration, where we return to reality and focus not on what the mind tells us should be different, but on learning to appreciate the joy of everything real in the here and now (yes, this even includes the less-than-ideal Mondays). As Neal Allen says in his book "Better Days Ahead,"

"Check yourself right now. Do you need anything? I mean right now, in your chair or on your bed as you read this sentence. Not in an hour, right now. I can promise you the answer is no, you don't need anything this second... Right this moment you are protected from the weather, you aren't starving, and you aren't being mugged at gunpoint. Your needs are being met. For everybody in civilized society, this fact of not needing anything is true for about 99.9% of the conscious moments of our lives. And yet instead of recognizing that we're 99.9% satisfied, we complain that life is constantly letting us down." p. 65-66

The good news is that if we slow down, we'll see that the happiness, contentment, ease, peace, joy, and excitement that we think are only found on Saturday and Sunday or during vacation on some exotic island, aren't outside things at all. These are all emotions that are alive inside of us and that we can cultivate moment to moment. Does this mean that we'll never again have an awful Monday where nothing goes right, we're tired, and we want to be anywhere other than the office? No! But it does mean that even on those days we will be invited back to reality that even on our worst days, there is still 99.9% of satisfaction that we can look for. Find it!