How often do you stop and give yourself permission to gather your thoughts or contemplate your existence? More than a few of my friends have told me that their morning walks is when they have the time to think and meditate. My walk is usually after 11pm and I’m usually listening to a podcast or a book, so my mind is all over the place when I walk. But my morning shower does the trick for me. The pounding hot water on the back of my head wakes me up and lets me stop and to figure things out, in the moment, for the day, for the foreseeable future. 

I have to smile when I think about last year, when I was writing these daily reflection prompts and tried to get my classroom of sixth graders to meditate or do a meditative practice during our daily 20-minute mentorship class session. We never quite got there. I get it. They’re rushing to class, seeing their friends and enemies, all the stuff that needs to get done or hasn’t been getting done… no one is closing their eyes and leaving themselves vulnerable to their neighbor no matter whether I’ve lowered the lights and played soothing music or not. I certainly wasn’t able to meditate when I was in junior high half a century ago. It was certainly a different world back then. That’s too bad. I could have used a different way to deal with things beyond staying busy, pretending that nothing was wrong or not thinking about it. That clearly didn’t work.

Maybe you’re in a place where you don’t feel the need to meditate or re-center yourself on a regular basis. If that’s true, more power to you. It’s kind of a bother, this need to stop and reassess where you’re heading for the day or in your life. That’s more or less how I meandered through most of my adult life, just going from moment to moment, dealing with whatever emergency or problem was in my path and that kind’a worked. Until I got ill in 2012 and realized, for all of my busy-ness and constant efforts, I was nowhere near what I thought I wanted in my life. Working through that potentially fatal illness made me stop and re-evaluate everything. And even then, once I got better, I tried to get back on the constant-motion road I’d been on and didn’t rethink things again until I lost my job in 2014. And here I am nine-years later, reassessing and trying to figure out, where do I go from here? I thought I knew and made decisions based on those beliefs. I kind’a wish I’d spent more in the shower meditating the future I am now in. Happy Monday, y’all. Be safe and intentional out there.