Choose Your Own Adventure (A Mindfulness Moment)

I notice that my jaw is tight. I command it to loosen, and it listens. My eyes feel like they’ve just finished gorging on a Thanksgiving feast — swollen now, they’re hoping to get a bout of rest after lunch. My neck threatens to freeze in place if I demand one more thing of it this morning. I don’t. All physical signs point to…what? Compared to the world of emotion we experience, there is only a small village of physiological symptoms. Since mine can travel anywhere they want, I suppose I will ask them to travel somewhere nice.

But I am somewhere nice. A desk, bowed in the middle from the many hours it has dedicated to people like me. People who want to contribute. And do well. And do right. A glass door to a rickety deck with a new floor. The perfect place for enjoying the sun and relegating lavish falsehoods to the bigwigs who bustle around South of here. A clean but cluttered shelf that aspires to be a great coffee station. Its coffee is divine indeed. And its Band-aids and toolkit are very handy as well.

Yes, my symptoms came from somewhere nice, but maybe not for the reasons you’d think.

My picketing, protesting neck came not from the bowed desk or hours of working at it. But it did come from the sum of the parts: the somewhere nice. Because it is a place I can leave at any time. Even in time to…