Lent Photo a Day: Meditate

I’ve never been one for meditation, at least not in the sense that most people imagine it. I don’t take a specific, regular time every day to find a quiet place and consciously clear or focus my thoughts. I don’t practice yoga that teaches me to relax my body and calm my mind. Even when I go to bed at night, my brain is usually spinning with thoughts until I fall asleep. The rare quiet time I do find is filled with prayer, which is a form of meditation, but it’s not exactly clearing my mind of thought.

But every now and then, I do escape from the busyness of my external and internal worlds. Sometimes it’s snuggling in my bed, listening to the rain on the roof. Sometimes it’s soaking in a hot bathtub full of bubbles. Sometimes it’s in front of a crackling fireplace. Sometimes it’s sitting on the porch, watching the sun rise or set. Sometimes it’s relaxing next to (or in) the pool. But wherever and whenever it is, it is my chance to relax my body, and then to relax my mind. And I think that perhaps I benefit from it all the more because it is rare, and therefore treasured. 

In our busy worlds, I think that too few of us (myself included) don’t take the time to meditate. We don’t give our minds a chance to rest, a chance to escape from our own hectic thoughts. We rarely focus our thoughts on only one thing, and most of our thoughts are focused on externals – things that we need to get done, problems that we need to fix, issues that we are charged with solving. We rarely give ourselves a mental breather. But our minds need a break, too.

So for the remainder of Lent, I am going to try to find at least a few minutes every day to close myself away from the external, to clear my thoughts, to give my mind a rest, to relax and to focus. To meditate.

Meditate.

Islands in the Stream

I was chatting with some friends the other day about our weddings, and we all tried to think of our favorite moment of our respective wedding days. There were many wonderful moments that I cherish about my wedding day, but having to pick only one, I decided that it would have to be after our wedding ceremony when my husband and I were having photographs taken outside the reception hall before we made our official grand entrance as husband and wife. The caterers had brought us a tray of hors d’oeuvres and two flutes of champagne, and as the photographer was setting up, we began practicing our first dance. It was a warm, sunny spring afternoon, the sun reflecting off the nearby lake, the caterers had made themselves scarce and the photographer was off to the side, and my new husband and I were in each other’s arms, humming and laughing together as we waltzed under the gazebo.

It was a wonderful private moment of peace between the chaos of the ceremony and the chaos of the reception (happy, well-organized chaos, but chaos nonetheless). It was an island of calm amid the racing streams of hustle and bustle that comprised the rest of the day. It refreshed us both enough that we could relax and enjoy our reception and our time with friends and family.

The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to take – or make – those moments of calm in the middle of our busy lives. And I realize how little time it takes to stop and refresh myself. Something as simple as getting up when I wake up at 6:00am instead of tossing and turning for half an hour until I’m “supposed” to get up and sitting in my quiet kitchen enjoying a cup of coffee before the rest of the house wakes up. Or leaving 15 minutes early for a meeting so I can sit in the parking lot listening to classical music. Or putting off the grocery shopping when my son wants to sit with me and read me a book. Or going to bed half an hour before I really need to go to sleep so I can snuggle and chat with my husband without the distractions of email or the phone or the television or the dirty dishes or the buzzer of the dryer reminding me that there’s laundry to be folded. 

Islands in the stream of life. Find them. Make them. And enjoy them.