Learning Mindfulness, So Far

We're about halfway through Lent, with only a few weeks to go, so I figure it's worth writing down what I've been doing for 40 days and 40 nights this year.

I decided to try out mindfulness meditation.

This sounds like something Whole Foods-y people do, like something people who listen to Enya do, like something Gwyneth Paltrow would do.

But when some people close to me started trying mindfulness - and raving about it - I thought that 1) it might be worth trying, 2) at least it can't hurt, and 3) this gets me out of giving up chocolate this year.

I was leaving the house and having to run back because I'd forget if I'd locked the door (I always had). I would stare at my to-do list for ten minutes unable to get started. These things are normal for a lot of people and if that's the price I pay for trying to do as much as I possibly can in a given day, then I'm ready to pay it. But if I could avoid those side effects, it would be nice.

So I started listening to mindfulness tracks on my way to work. Ten minutes of my commute each day, every day, until Easter. 

I really hated the first two weeks. SO painfully boring. My brain just raced until I could take the exit onto the parkway and turn on the radio to replace my thoughts with somebody else's. Those guided meditations I was listening to - some were good, most were weird (and full of wind chimes! Why?)

As it turns out, just trying to clear your mind and acknowledge your thoughts counts as mindfulness, too. So now I just breathe in for four, out for four, in for four, out for four until about ten minutes has passed. 

And then start my day. (I realize this might make me sound like a distracted driver...it is making me a more focused one.) Over the last week or so, I've noticed that I don't miss those ten minutes of radio as much as I used to.

I'm less likely to forget the name of a person I've just met, and I'm not forgetting where I put my phone or if I've locked the door as often anymore. If someone says something rude to me or about me (working in politics, it happens pretty often) I just...don't care.

So that's where I am at this point. I'm hopeful that my memory and focus will keep getting better as we get closer to Easter.

Passport Renewal

It's been just shy of a decade since I got my first passport. In the picture, I'm tan from a summer spent at the pool, and wearing metallic eye shadow...after all, it was 2007. That day my mom took me to the post office, I had no international trips planned. I had only left the country once, for a few-hour foray into Montreal during the summer we lived in New York.

Since then, that little book went with me to Japan and France and Spain and Costa Rica and Colombia and Italy and England. Those stamps are important to me. (The fact that the very last one is on page "lucky 13" seems like no accident.)

Handing over the one little thing that's been on every trip, in every airport, packed in every suitcase - the one common thread through all those years and places - was not something I was excited about. But federal law is federal law, and federal law doesn't really care about my scrapbook.

Ten years older, 7 countries down. Six weeks to wait for the new passport to arrive by mail. And then...where next?