Good Day, Sunshine

I just got back from a walk.  My first walk this year that hasn't involved gloves, a hat, and a down jacket. I am lucky enough to live four blocks from Lake Michigan, and as I headed down the sidewalk, I could feel the cold breeze from the lake I couldn't yet see.  My feet carried me along a route I could do with my eyes closed.  West towards the football stadium, then down the hill where
the lake awaited.  

It's been a long, cold, seemingly interminable winter and the bay is still frozen over.  The ice fishing shacks have been pulled off the lake, but the only water visible is at the very edges of the shore.  This fact only barely registered with me, though, as I was wrapped up in my own thoughts.  Our minds are busy places.  At least mine is.  In the twenty minutes it took me to reach the lake I thought about, in no particular order, whether I should have worn a heavier jacket, my daughter's impending college graduation, the water and electric bill, the Kohls gift card in my wallet, what I should cook for dinner tomorrow and if my son was cold at tennis practice.  (Spoiler: he wasn't.)

All of a sudden I turned a corner and felt the sun.  Really felt it.  Something about its sudden warmth and brightness stopped me, right on the path.  And I know this sounds corny as hell, but as I stood there, I not only felt the sun, I suddenly became aware of all I had been missing while deep in my random thoughts.  I heard robins and chickadees.  I smelled the warming dirt, wet and swampy still under the pines.  I heard someone honk as they drove by and I waved without seeing who it was.  (Sorry if you saw me looking like an idiot, standing and smiling on the bike path.) I was suddenly and fully PRESENT.  

Mindfulness is such a buzzword these days, and I really try to be aware and be mindful as I go about my days.  Obviously, I am spectacularly bad at it.  My brain is constantly bouncing from one idea or plan or memory to another.  It's like a demented monkey.  I suspect I am not the only one.  Even while I am trying to be present, my brain keeps up a commentary, telling me I'm doing a good job at being mindful, or reminding me what I should be noticing.  But this evening, as I kept walking, I managed to quiet it down enough that I noticed a pair of ducks swimming around the diminishing ice in the lagoon.  I scared off some hungry robins searching in the earth for whatever they could find.  I stayed present, in the park, in each moment as it passed.  

As I turned the corner and headed toward home, the sun was out of my eyes, but its job had been done.  I felt it on my left cheek all the way home.  After the long, cold winter, I was awake and I was
warm.  I don't think mindfulness will ever come easily to me, but maybe that's the point.  Maybe we are to simply struggle every day to notice what is right in front of us, and to smile like a fool at the sunshine.