My brother and I have had a couple conversations on mindfulness. My basic understanding is that one does a task with one’s whole attention. But the doing is more complicated than the saying.
I’ve discovered that if I walk Sophie before my own walk, I come up with too many excuses to cut my walk short or not go at all. That’s because I’ve allowed my brain to fill with all the activities needing attention. I blame my failures to walk on a mind too full of the day ahead.
So yesterday, I took my walk first, before Sophie’s.
My mind was quieter. Maybe self-care is an aspect of mindfulness. It certainly led to a more productive day.
Mindful Writing
I began reflecting on the mind part of mindfulness. Specifically, the creative mind. What I love is being deeply immersed in another world. It can be someone else’s world—and often is. But even better is to be immersed in my own. That’s why I write—but I often find myself on the outskirts rather than fully inside my own worlds.
I continue with last week’s determination to write for 15 minutes every day for the final book of my trilogy. Very often, that happens at or just before bedtime. One night, I wrote some highly unsatisfying prose, but fortunately, my sleeping mind came up with an important point I had missed. Hooray for sleeping minds!
For the last two days, I’ve been paying attention to a desire to work on an entirely different project. Not the verse novel awaiting further editing. No, this time the heroine of my other fairy tale retelling is begging for her story to be told in verse. The hero remains in prose.
And so, here I go again, into a new project. Why? I don’t know, except it feels right. And don’t we have to trust these urges? Especially urges that demand our entire attention?
It’s already May. Where did April go?
Kate Harrington 