mindfulness focus day 1: notes from the trenches

March 7, 2013

okay, i’m not going to do this every night [publicly, that is].  but here are some things i noticed today:

i sort of hate my phone.  because it really is an incredibly addictive little parasite, and i don’t like how it fragments my attention.  i’m not going back to a non-smart phone, because — well, i’ve become dependent.  and i suppose there ARE good things about having the ability to snap a photo at any moment, or play music or look up a quick fact.  but it’s a little scary to realize that all of the negatives i associated with handheld technology before succumbing to the iPhone [in 2011] have come to fruition.

i need to spend some time away from its siren call.

mindful eating is very, very hard.  especially when you’ve been trained to eat as fast as possible — and when that training has been reinforced by New Parenthood.  however, when there’s NO pager and no baby, i have no excuse.

mindful chores are possible.

i know this because of the way my father-in-law washes dishes.

a very busy [and therefore sleep-deprived] surgeon in miami beach, he considers himself KGB – king of gall bladders, because of his abilities in that arena.  but i consider him a mindfulness guru, whether he realizes it or not [well, he will now, because he at least sometimes reads the blog 🙂 ].  
it doesn’t matter how much of a disaster the kitchen has turned into [and with a son who is an actual chef, it can get pretty disastrous – the kind of mess that just makes me want to curl into the fetal position and deal with it in the morning].  yet in the thick of it, he can always be found by the sink, calmly scrubbing/rinsing/drying one dish after another until they’re ALL DONE.  and i’ve never seen him look even slightly miffed during the process.  
i thought about this today, as i prepped a’s bottles / dinner / cleaned up [with josh’s help].   chores aren’t inherently bad.  they can be time to decompress, perform something simple with pretty much guaranteed success, and you can even use them as time to talk or listen to music/podcasts/etc, if that makes things more pleasant. 
in fact for me, mindfulness at work is much harder.  
i think i need to do some reading on the topic.  [nicely timed post, angeliki!]
IN OTHER NEWS
she’s back:

from today’s day care ‘newsletter’
tongue out = sign of immense concentration
[also b/c she cannot currently breathe through her nose]
and with that, good night!

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