Awareness Assessment

Hendry and I were taking a nature walk over the weekend. It’s a short one mile loop on a boardwalk through a beautiful, tropical wetland area.  At some point I realized that we were walking pretty fast, like ‘trying to get somewhere in NYC fast’.  As a result, I was mostly looking at the ground instead of taking in everything that was around us. I was physically present in this forest and yet mentally I was completely checked out. 

I turned to Hendry and asked him why we were walking so fast. After all, we weren’t trying to get anywhere. This one mile loop was our destination for the afternoon and we had no other plans for the day. 

It got me thinking about why we might walk fast: 

To get someplace 

To get out of a situation that makes us uncomfortable. Like when you’re walking home alone at night near the Morgan L stop in Bushwick and it’s just too eerie and quiet. 

To improve our fitness/ get a workout 

Basically, to accomplish something and get on to the next thing. We rarely walk fast to simply enjoy the moment. 

And like when I turned to Hendry and asked why we were walking so fast, an awareness practice begins with asking yourself what you are doing and why?

And that might be it. We take an assessment and find nothing bothersome so we change nothing about our situation. We simply drop into it more fully. Through our assessment, we become mentally present with our situation. 

Or maybe we realize for some reason or other, we’re uncomfortable in the present moment and moving fast trying to escape the feeling, to arrive somewhere new. We’re running onto the next thing mentally - the meal we’re going to prepare in 2 hours, the errands we need to run, the email we need to write, a future conversation that needs to be had. 

So what do we do in this moment when we realize we’re uncomfortable, irritated, angry, frustrated and don’t want to be where we are right now? 

Usually when we’re super irritated and everything is annoying us we spend the whole time attempting to run away, reason with ourself, calm ourself down or take it out on someone else. There is some measure of us pushing away the discomfort so we don’t have to face it directly.

You can think of it like when you have bug bites covering your legs. All you want to do is itch the bites to make the irritation go away. But if you scratch it, it doesn’t relieve how you’re feeling. It makes it worse.

In these moments, can we slow down and allow ourselves to just be irritated and angry? Can we allow ourselves to feel it fully and let it dissipate naturally? Can we not scratch?