This week, we welcome Margaret Fletcher to the Center for Mindfulness blog. Margaret is a CFM-certified MBSR teacher/teacher-trainer who lives in NH, and enjoys movies, books and really beautiful fabrics.
My husband, a life explorer like myself, once returned from a meditation retreat having noticed something quite remarkable. As a musician, his mind contains a particularly vast library of songs, lyrics and compositions in many musical genres. On this retreat, he had experienced a phenomenon I’ve heard described as an “earworm;” that is, a repeating song lyric, really just a phrase. What was interesting was how pertinent the lyric seemed to be, in the moment. His mind was offering him some very useful instruction, by way of song.
This memory came to me, just this morning, as I heard a bit of an old Elvis Costello song playing in my mind:
“Every day I write the book.”
I pause to really take this lyric in, and consider. When I’ve been challenged in life, confused, feeling lost, and looking for direction, it’s been so easy to imagine that somewhere there is an instruction manual. Where is “The Book” that will tell me how to understand life, and especially, what to do with it. Just show me that book! As an MBSR teacher, this kind of question comes up often in class. “But how do I…?” and “What do you do when…?” Oh, do I know this longing to be instructed, to have an answer given to me, written down.
Meanwhile, the conditions of life present themselves, wild and wooly, with patches that feel settled and then suddenly turn to unsettled. It’s unpredictable, never to be repeated, always unique and complex. Every day, there is a great story writing itself. Being awake to the ebbs and flows and straight-aways, inside me and around me, I can be open, simultaneously knowing and navigating. Every day, in this way, I write the book of my life.
Mr. Costello’s song has a nice swinging-walk rhythm to it that seems to fit me this morning. It’s a welcome earworm. I’ve been inside the rhythm of attending to class participants, composing emails, greeting meditators, walking around the Center for Mindfulness pursuing my business, all to the beat of an everyday, rolling pace. I know it won’t always be so steady and quietly joyous. I’m happy in the way the pages are unfolding just now. I know I can stay with what is steady in me, when turbulence is more the order of the day. It’s all in the book.