dear gentle friends,
Every single one of us on planet Earth is dealing with a lot right now. And even if you are fortunate enough to be heading off for a few days or weeks to get away from it all, life will be waiting for you when you get back. And right now, life is challenging on pretty much every level I can think of.
After yet another terrible thing happened in the world, I wondered how gentleness could possibly help me or anyone else get through their day right now. That’s when Thích Nhất Hạnh’s “mindfulness bell” practice popped into my head. If you’re not familiar with the practice, it’s based on the idea that we all need reminders through the day to come back to a sense of open awareness. While driving through a big city, TNH used each red light as an opportunity to smile. When he arrived at this destination, he was peaceful and content.
Seriously? Can anyone other than a Buddhist monk find joy in waiting at a red light?
That was my initial response when I started playing with this practice during the darkest days of 2020. Most major wisdom traditions extol the virtue of finding joy in the everyday. On an intellectual level, I understand this, but most of us think that red lights are interruptions or burdens. We think we recharge and relax only when we buy a pretty thing or an interesting experience, something you can tell your friends about. Stopping at a red light or straightening up the house before bed doesn’t tick those boxes.
And, yet.
I think TNH was on to something rather radical: finding peace, maybe even joy, in our daily irritants — stop lights, chores, annoying items on our daily to-do list.
Sure, this practice requires effort and an initial period of reminding, but the benefits have been pretty dramatic for me in terms of creating a reserve of calm contentment that has improved the days when the universe has my back, the days when things decidedly do not go to plan…and the days when some things turn out and some things don’t.
Here’s my three-step riff on TNH’s mindfulness bell practice:
(1) Can you add or change something to make the task more enjoyable?
Listening to podcasts, audiobooks or music is the obvious choice of something that can be added to improve an otherwise neutral or slightly unpleasant chore. I love French chanson — and my family is slightly less enamored with the genre — so I happily listen to Carla Bruni on my own when I’m running errands. It seems like a silly inconsequential thing, but I now look forward to that time.
(2) Once you’re doing the task paired with a treat, try choring solo.
Listening a podcast while doing something else is not exactly what TNH was talking about. Most of us aren’t Buddhist monks, though, and are less adept at jumping directly from a neutral moment to finding joy without some help. Once you’ve learned to enjoy the neutral activity with your training wheels, challenge yourself to take small moments — the time it takes to make the bed — and focus on the neutral activity itself. Over time, you can expand the length of time that you focus on the task itself. After just a few weeks of focusing on the pleasure of making the bed, you’ll find you can rest in peaceful awareness more easily and for longer periods of time.
(3) Expand your universe of joy
Our negativity bias leaves us drained because we spend energy worrying, planning, and complaining about both unpleasant and neutral tasks. Learning to find joy in the neutral things makes life flow a lot more easily. Whether you’re listening to your favorite podcast while weeding or washing the dishes with your focus trained on the warm water and soft suds of the sponge, the aim is to find quiet joy in as many neutral moments throughout the day as you can. With practice, your to-do list will become less a catalog of dreaded chores and more an opportunity to find joy in the quiet moments of your life. And when the larger world is as challenging as it is right now, we all need to find joy when and where we can so that we have strength when and where we need it.
Whatever life sends your way, may you find joy in a tiny task this week.
warmly,
alison
