See someone do a random act of kindness walking down the street? Have something funny happen to you at the grocery store or driving where a few moments of mindfulness kept you from regressing to a raging lunatic? Read a blog or short description of mindfulness in action? These are great reminders that mindfulness is about everyday connection and stepping out of our own stories. These can also inspire others to start, or keep practicing when the going gets tough. So pay it forward. Share those stories here!
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Here’s a nice airport story by Naomi Shihab Nye:
Gate A-4
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well— one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,” said the flight agent. “Talk to her . What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, shu-bid-uck, habibti? Stani schway, min fadlick, shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”
We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies— little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts— from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single traveler declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo— we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
Then the airline broke out free apple juice and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend— by now we were holding hands— had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate— once the crying of confusion stopped— seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
Notes:
Naomi Shihab Nye short story from Honeybee (Greenwillow Books, 2008)
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Wow!
Thank you so much for sharing that Jud. I actually missed the first sentence in your post so I read it while under the impression it was from your own life. Added a nice twist to it :smile:
Adding something from my own story: The other day I was walking in a park in Gothenburg, at dusk. It was cold, I was walking towards a course and in the middle of a park stood an old man playing his Accordion. Normally I might just smile a little, perhaps put a coin in his hat and then rapidly move on but this time I was the only person nearby so he invited me to a dance of sorts. In this moment I found myself released from thoughts about the future and instead my attention turned toward this old man and his lovely songs, my feet jumped along for some spontaneous dancing . After he played more and more songs we talked a bit and besides offering whatever monetary resource I could, I also wished him best of luck in his life.
That conversation and interaction, listening to both his music and his history actually had a deep transformative effect on the way I met beggars in the streets. With a deeper sense of shared humanity however different backgrounds and appearances we might have.
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An opposite-of-mindfulness story from my morning read of the news:
Perhaps I am behind the times, but I just learned about the “selfie stick” that let’s people take better pictures of themselves. AND it was one of TIME Magazines best inventions of 2014! Amazing.
Selfie stick in TIME’s best invention list
Blurb in the New York Times on how ridiculous this is: “Grand tour of the self.”
Tonight, in honor of thanksgiving, our community sitting group at the Center for Mindfulness discussed gratitude. A woman in the group shared the following:
Each year, she and her now 8-year old son reflect on the generosity that the police and fire departments give by keeping their community safe. During holidays, because these folks are at work and can’t be home with their families, so she and her son bring them fresh baked cookies to show their gratitude.
What a great example of giving thanks.
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Great story Albin -thanks for posting it!
And now a funny story of my own:
When I started working at the Center for Mindfulness this past year, my wife and I just moved to Worcester Massachusetts, and enjoyed our first real snowfall the night before Thanksgiving a few days ago. In our old neighborhood, it was quite a ritual to get out with neighbors to help each other shovel snow, and I was excited to try this in my new neighborhood.
So Thanksgiving morning, I headed out to shovel the driveway of the oldest neighbors I had met, figuring that they could use the help the most. Typical for an early winter storm, the snow was about 4 inches of very wet heavy snow, and I labored for about 45 minutes to clear enough of a path down their (seemingly endless!) driveway such that they could get their car out. I was checking in with my ego to see how much of the shoveling was for them, and how much was for me (to get their thanks etc.), but the real test of this came about 10 min after I finished: someone that they had contracted with came by and plowed the rest of their driveway in the blink of an eye -there was no way of telling that I had done any work at all!
As I went off to help another neighbor who was genuinely struggling with his snowblower, it was a hilarious reminder of having good intentions, getting to see how much ego was behind them, and also checking in with circumstances to see how to wisely spend my time (i.e. was something done in vain). The definition of the word vanity seems to fit perfectly here: 1) “admiration of one’s own accomplishments” and 2) “the quality of being worthless or futile…” Great mindfulness practice on both fronts!
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Hahaha :-) Thank you for sharing Jud, I recognize countless similiar experiences in my own life with this special mixture of genuine compassionate intentions together with ones of vanity as well, that in the end turn out either not helping in the way expected or helping out in a very invisible way (which is usually when I notice the self-cherising motivations for the behavior).
Wish you and all on the forums a grateful thanksgivings day with lots of relationships to be thankful of!
Mitakuye Oyasin!
Here’s a very nice article that just appeared in the New York Times by Stephen Batchelor, reminding us about the value of noticing the mundane and often overlooked.
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Hi Jud,
I too have had many self talk conversations about the reason I am doing something - especially if I am wanting to give someone a hand. My initial motivation is the truest indicator I think of why I am doing what I do. It is afterwards that the myriad of thoughts kick in and I end up on the whirlwind tour of me or them motivation…“Breathe” and “that is just a thought” have become my mantra these days.
Only just found this spot in cfmHOME but really appreciate the turn of the conversation to noticing motive. I am aware how easy it is for me to start criticising myself for having mixed motives - compassion, generosity mixed with wanting to feel good about myself - and even better, to be seen by others to be a “good” person. Recently I was on retreat and in one of the group discussions mentioned this. Jill Shepherd mentioned a teacher of hers (who I don’t remember) as saying something along the lines of “If we wait for pure motives we’ll never do anything.” How true. I too have started being a little kinder to myself and my mixed motives when I realised that often that initial impulse is from kindness - pure and simple - and it is afterwards that the more calculating mind kicks in and starts working out how to get maximum ego benefit from the impulse. An interesting space to play in and work out what might be ways to avoid getting caught up in perpetuating the ego’s desires.