You Have The Time

Dear all,

A busy few weeks ahead...

The Monday and Friday lunchtime mindfulness drop-ins continue for another couple of weeks, ending Friday November 28th. 

I'm teaching a Mindfulness for Pain Workshop online on Tuesday 25^th November, 2-3pm. This workshop explores common cognitive patterning around pain, whether chronic or acute, as well as simple practices to down-regulate the nervous system’s response. You can join here on Microsoft Teams, and feel free to ask me if you have any questions. 

I am teaching an online mindfulness day retreat on Saturday 29^th November, 11am-4pm. All are welcome, including the general public.

And - an invitation from the Global Compassion and Empathy Initiative: 'We warmly invite you to reserve your place to celebrate a decade of the GCEI on Tuesday 2nd December, 10am-12.30pm at the EFI. Join acclaimed journalist Allan Little and distinguished guests and friends as we explore the practice and potential of compassion to speak into crises, bridge divides, and transform our fractured world.'

For this week’s MindLetter, I return to a musical theme...because certain times of term need musical metaphors. 

You Have The Time

There is a refrain in my head, and it goes like this: rushrushbusybusymustmustdododododododododo.

Imagine that on repeat, played by a terrified orchestra for hours at a time, in a steamy hot tropical hall so that the instruments repeatedly veer out of tune and time even as they try to catch up with each other, the musicians sweating, growing pallid for want of water or food, hair wild, clothes shredded from tangling in violin bows and piano keys and woodwind segments – and you capture what happens in my head during the busiest times of term.

And, I imagine, something of what happens in yours.

Yet I must have walloped mine with sufficient mindfulness over the years, because these days, it’s not that it doesn’t show up – it very much does – but there’s another refrain underneath. If I visualise the latter, hold the sense of it in my mind, it cross-cuts, is perpendicular to the first; it’s like the note of a major third on a piano scale. It is green, the colour of lush verdant plants, where the first one is explosive purple-yellow, the colour of a bruise.

If the first one goes rushrushbusybusymustmustdododododododododo, the second refrain goes you have the time.  

You have the time to smell the purple buddleia growing by the side of the railway line.

You have the time to walk, rather than run to the kitchen in bare feet that ache from an old injury.

You have the time to stroke Hope, while she asks, before your hands return to typing.

You have the time to show the curious child the core of the hawthorn berry you have picked for jelly.

When the orchestra is wildest, I have time for none of these things. And yet the time is there, silent and unlived, so that at the end of a day, a week, or a season, I too feel silent and unlived. The instruments of the orchestra may still be rostered, but they are lost, grasping after one another. Something in me knows that I have not got more done, or if I have it no long matters, because I have also undone myself. Sometimes it is a small undoing, sometimes large; but the debt has come in, and settling is called for.

Staring into the mouth of a hunger for life, connection, or joy that has gone unfed is not a pretty thing. But this, too, is something for which we have the time. The moments with the buddleia, or the bare feet in motion, the old injury, the loving dog, and the curious child, are times to acknowledge and to respect, to grieve and to forgive, to feel that which we have not let ourselves want, and to sense – with relief – that whatever it is might after all be possible. These are moments of being human, of all the instruments of the orchestra tuning to each other, building something as beautiful as whatever it is that lies around the corner in Barber’s Adagio for Strings. 

How might today, this week, this season of your life be different if you believe - just for a moment - that you have the time?

Warm wishes,

Kitty