We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
"Talking about change is easy" a friend said to me recently, "but how easily do you actually accept it in your own life?" My answer was silence because I knew they were making a real point. It is easy to talk or write about working with difficulties and change in our lives, but the real test comes when things start to go in ways that we do not agree with. We tend to have a desire to plan out our lives, both for the long term and on a day-to-day basis. We have agendas and calendars that map out our lives, sometimes to the minute. It can help us feel in control, with plans like this. However, this is just an illusion. Things change, continually, big and small.
Mindfulness certainly helps us with the little changes: when there is a long queue in the supermarket, when traffic is bad, when meetings go on too long. We can easily work with the increasing tension in our bodies and notice the thoughts that arise. We can draw our breathing down into our body and root ourselves in the ground. Moments like these can become periods of practice, allowing us to inject pauses between the stressful event and our reaction.
However, how do we work with bigger life changes that affect our desire for love and meaning, the direction of our life, or with sudden moments that are beyond our control? It is easy for me to say that I will face it with a calm mind, but a sudden threatening event often means that my reaction comes out of a deep place within and can be narrow and defensive.
Does this mean that my mindfulness practice is useless and hypocritical or that it is of no benefit in working with real change? What I hope is that my practice begins to work on these deep fears so that even if the initial response was not perfect, space begins to enter gradually. Hard questions can be asked of us. Mindfulness does not consist in being perfect in our response each time but in trying to respond to each event with a benevolent heart. This is never easy when we feel our deepest wishes are threatened. However, if I try, in that moment or a day later, to drop into my heart and not just my nervous system, I feel better and sometimes more space enters.
I try to accept what happens. It might not be what I considered ideal, but it’s what life has given me, in this unpredictable world. I cannot control everything but I can work with my heart. I try to accept that this may not be what I wanted, but it is what I got. If I can do that, I notice that even though sadness remains, suffering is eased. The heart becomes more free to accept that there are other versions of reality than the one which I desired.
