It has been my experience over and over again that there is hardly anything more difficult than to love someone.
-Rilke
One of the greatest obstacles to being present is the human tendency to fall into the comfort zone of mindless repetition. Health care and charity work are flooded with tasks that, once done a few times, may rapidly become monotonous. How does the dishwasher on the other side of the cafeteria wall remain attentive to his or her work when they've done the same job eight hours a day for four years? How can the receptionist bring energy and light to each one of her hundreds of encounters each week? How does the nurse who has delivered a thousand babies bring her sense of joy and energy to delivery number one thousand and one?...
As a child, I used to view some religious rituals as silly. What value could there be in repeating things just to repeat them? As I grew older, I learned about the challenge of mindfulness. A Catholic who recites the rosary mindlessly may yet gain some measure of peace. However, compare this to the experience of the person of faith who repeats the rosary or other familiar prayers with an open heart and an attentive spirit.
The practice of mindfulness in meditation leads to mindfulness in caregiving. The practice of mindfulness to nature creates a greater ability for the soul to open to the pain of another. The practice of mindfulness to art, poetry, music all enable us to see not only the beauty that is there, but to join with the agony that is always inherent in great beauty.
Truth is beauty. Truth is hard. Mindfulness to the most ordinary of our actions enriches not only our own life experience, but the lives of all those we encounter in our journey across our days and nights.
Exercise: Find a common object - perhaps the water bottle sitting on your desk. Observe it as if it were a thing of great beauty - for it may be. Tilt it. Watch the way the water moves. Look past the nature of the substance we know as plastic and think of the way light travels through the ripples in the bottle, bounces off its facets, curls around its shape.
Reflection: Too often, people think beauty is reserved for red roses and purple sunsets. Beauty can exist in any place we look if we use our sacred eyes - in the withered skin of a dying patient, in the contorted face of an expectant mother in labor, in the eyes of an eight year old with cancer. The great (and unsung) caregivers on this earth are able to feel this kind of beauty and allow it to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. These are individuals we think of as people of grace.
