Spring Cleaning

The apple blossoms cluster together on the apple branches

Hello again. It’s the time of year when Wisconsin treads awkwardly across the partition between Spring and Summer. It’s 85 today, but next week will be cold. I made myself a floral arrangement today. The lilacs bloom in the dooryard. Summer sings of stonefruit and a cold margarita by the pool. (woowee look at me I’m Sam Sifton)

I’ve been thinking about this idea of spring cleaning for your mind. Ever since I read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, I sort of think about being conscious as a grand Western video game. We are the worlds we build for ourselves and today I want to revisit the places I’ve been. Perhaps this blog is just a place for my tumbleweeds and dustbunnies.

Places

I think location-based metaphors are sort of an interesting way of explaining the ebb and flow of our thoughts and emotions. “I was in a really dark place”, or “he’s very distant”, or “it comes from a place of love” tease at a broader idea of what it means to live as a person in a human body.

I’ve been thinking that the simplest form of love is wanting to be around someone. Kids and dogs are really good at that. No matter how much I shouted or pummeled him when I was younger, my brother always wanted to be near. I think that’s really special.

As I’ve explored a personal definition of mindfulness a little more deeply, I’ve realized that you can make this place of love around you. I’ve been trying to set an intention every morning that I want to be inviting most of all. I want to be near you.

I think being present is being near to the world. I’ve been trying to be very conscious about allowing that little video game to align with the world around me. One thing that brings me great joy is turning off all the lights before bed and walking around my apartment. There’s a very animal heightened sensitivity to sounds that’s really delightful when it’s quiet. Ice water tastes better before bed.

Perception

I struggle a lot with reconciling how I perceive myself with the way the world perceives me. Too often I’ve made it my goal to control that external perception. But I think people know that. They can smell it. Again, in the spirit of being near to the world, I want my perception of myself to align with the way that the world perceives me sometimes, so I try to be a student of interaction. The best results have come when I embody a spirit of lingering.

David Brooks tells me to be lingerable in his self-help book. Being lingerable is the skill of savoring an interaction when it’s soon over and communicating that to the other person. I think it really comes down to finding a way to like the thing that you’re doing in the moment and convey that to the other person. I try to be subtle. Maybe the words don’t say what I mean, but the way I deliver them does.

Brooks also says that in every interaction, there are always two conversations happening: the words that are coming out of our mouths and the emotions that we are conveying. I think ending a phone call with “I love you” does both. Maybe I don’t end a work meeting that way, but maybe something to the effect of, “I think this was a good use of time. Appreciate the work that’s gone into this.”

Patterns

Perhaps we’re designed to recognize when life repeats itself. Maybe we come up with reasons why it does or it doesn’t. To me, seasons of life give me the opportunity to measure my growth.

It’s springtime again, and I’m congratulating myself. I’m asking, “how do I care for someone who is grieving?”, “how do I express gratitude?”, and “how do I live mindfully”. The answer to all those questions is different now than it was two years ago when I graduated college. When I find myself in situations that feel like a repeat, I’m able to build on where I was the last time I was in that place. It is all the same, yet again we are witness to change.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

walt whitman

xx Harrison