You Have To Slow Down

Yesterday I had a really mindful walk on the beach.

It’s where I walk really slowly and I can focus on what I am seeing in front of me without having any thoughts about them. I notice that when I look at things without labeling them, I can focus more on my experience.

It’s a hard practice for me to do. Even though I read, listen and meditate on the idea of mindfulness everyday, it still eludes me (like a damn handstand).

I walked really slowly. Even slower than Ray which is a first. I started taking into notice everything around me. But I was mostly occupied by the people.

A girl walked in front of me. She had a thin scarf-like skirt wrapped around her waist, showing off her perfect curves. Her hair was wavy and long with pink ombré.

I thought to myself: 

what a beautiful woman. What a sight of beauty before me.

Then to my left, a man walked past in hurried steps. He had a hunch back and he walked with both hands limp by his sides. His neck disappeared into his shoulders. 

I immediately thought: unlike that.

Then I caught myself thinking:

why do I not see beauty in that? There is beauty in him too.

A living, breathing being. There is a long history that happened in his life, there is the culture, the society, the sunshine and the cloud within him. Just like Thay Thich Nhat Hanh said:

And suddenly, I saw it. I didn’t just think it. I experienced his beauty. It brought a tremendous smile to my face. More than anything I felt when I looked at the girl and thought how beautiful she was. I felt deep joy for having somehow transcended the beauty standard that humans impose on each other.

After that, I started to study carefully every person I saw. I practiced the art of seeing beauty in everyone. It helped me stay mindful and maintain a smile on my face.

But I never experienced that deep feeling again.

These things come in glimpses. Very fleeting. But I understand now why the practice of mindfulness is so important.

When you dedicate yourself to staying in the presence, you begin to feel beauty and joy that have always been there, hidden in plain sight.

Our society teaches us that fulfillment is attained in the future.

Go to college. Get a job. Get a promotion. Get married. Prepare for retirement.

As if joy is something to be battered off with each achievement.

No wonder all of us are hurting.

We can’t even see beauty in another living being who shares 99% of our DNA.

It takes great effort to unlearn what has now sewn itself into our subconscious.

I think of myself as a house.

Most of the time, society tells us to take care of the house. That’s all we have, so we must:

Make it nice.

Make it big.

Decorate it.

Clean it.

But no matter how much stuff we fill it with, it always feels empty.

Through mindfulness your house begins to crack. At first, you freak out because it looks like you’re about to lose everything you’ve worked so hard for. 

Until this glimpse of light shines through the crack.

The light gives you a sense of joy you never felt before. 

You can call it eternal bliss if you believe in that.

Once the house completely falls apart, you see that you were never the house or the things inside it.

You are the presence that occupies the house. The same emptiness that occupies 4-walls and makes up a room.

You are eternal bliss.

The thing is, nobody can take the house down for you.

It’s not easy.

You are basically doing all of it with your bare hands. And it can’t be done quickly. You have to do it one mindful moment at a time.

That’s why you need to slow down.

It doesn’t mean giving up on your plans, live inside a cave and meditate all day (although that’s actually pretty dope).

It means taking the time to internalize, not memorize, that joy is right here right now.

And any challenge you set for yourself is something you do out of joy, of enjoying your present moment. Not so you can find some type of meaning in it.

That’s how you begin building a new house all over again.

This time treasuring every step because you know no matter how the house turns out — big, small, simple, complex, fancy, crooked — it cannot change the presence that occupies it.

The presence that never depended on the shape of the house in the first place.

The alternative is you may build a really nice house yet never get to feel what’s truly inside.

We — the Earth, human species, our collective consciousness — hurriedly reached the brink of a breaking point in the last few centuries.

By slowing down, we give ourselves a chance to evaluate. To contemplate our lives and remember what it is we truly want to make of this limited time we have together.

You and I didn’t come this far to be called a coincidence.

That much I believe in.