Salad Spinner Mindfulness

I caught myself sitting here at my desk and worrying about nothing this morning. To distract myself and to put all of this fretting aside, I now sit here at an outdoor table at one of my favorite coffee shops to put some words on paper.

Rarely do I sit here and do nothing.

Mainly, I sip and I think. And I write. Or I messily scribble random and disjointed ideas in a notebook – the words in these notebooks likely to never be read again. They are inked to the page for the sake of my tired brain that struggles to keep all the lamps lit – one for each of the creative bursts that spark to life when I try to do nothing.

My ideas and memories and perceptions are tossed around in some "Binary Amphitheatre of the Surreal and the Real," whirling and swirling them around and shooting them out onto the page in salad-spinner style.

I find myself in this divergent universe of the Surreal and the Real . . . careening from idea to idea, ultimately losing captivating "story ideas" in obscure files on my laptop or my external hard drive – gone and never to be found again.

Slipping scribbled scraps of papers into the eight shallow drawers of my Idea Cupboard. Recording obscure phrases in the notebooks I keep in my purse and in my Magic Bag. Scribbling plots on coasters and fragile napkins that rip at the touch of my pen tip. Recycling grand insights that have been hastily – sometimes frantically – jotted on the back of junk mail envelopes.

Some days I feel like a whirling dervish of pen and paper . . . like a tornado that can lift a house from its foundation and deposit it in a different county. I ask, “How did that happen? And I hear a whisper of an answer, “Don’t ask.”

Then there are those roaming ideas that resist capture with no way to corral all of them onto the page. They are born in the brain with such beauty, ease, and spontaneity. And then when I sit down to commit them to the page? They flee and flit away from my fingertips like fairy dust, leaving no forwarding address.

I don’t have a word for how it feels to witness the bold essence of a story idea vaporizing within me in my attempt to capture it and represent it. Hollow, comes to mind.

It is within these moments of the ethereal, the real, and the absurd when I feel like I come up against a massive Wall of Now. It is a rarity, this feeling. There are so many opportunities to follow and distractions to try on every single morning when my feet touch the floor. And I, like so many, attempt mindfulness techniques that draw me back to what I label as Reality.

On some days I am fortunate to discover the delicate combination that makes the magic that I call Mindful Awareness. I sit here outside this funky coffee shop with the wobbly table leg and listen to Bob Marley singing in the background. I overhear the conversation at the table next to me, hear the barista call out an order, hear a truck barrrrumping its way up the cobbled brick street in front of the coffee shop.

I take one last sip of my cold coffee and watch the man wearing the pork pie hat gazing out the front window of the shop – just staring and thinking about something that seems to transport him away from the coffeehouse chatter. It looks like he is good at doing nothing. Is his hat one of those magic hats that grounds him in the present moment?

Life is now. Life is good. This moment of mindfulness destroys my fretting, creating pools of stillness that allow for the water molecules to calm and to rest until a sufficient wave freshens the pool with a new wave of renewed mindfulness. The action of the wave is necessary to keep things fresh and alive. Today is a good day. Today I write.