There’s a slight pressure in my forehead, my third eye, and an awakening sensation in my awareness. It's fleeting: just as soon as it’s there I notice it’s gone.
Then, at the corner of my awareness, there it is again…
I don’t need to try so hard, I don’t need to put any effort into it, just an exploratory, curious playful corner of my awareness. Lightly, ever so lightly, I can rest there and not make the feeling go away again.
I'm not breathing, I notice. I'm holding my breath and I can't feel the sensation when I'm holding my breath.
I breathe in deeply and release.
I realise that there is a large part of me sitting in anticipation, waiting.
Relax, my breath tells it.
A sip of my coffee, and a quick glance taking in the room around me. It surprises me, the things not yet done, not yet attended to.
And with this fresh awareness, arises a contemplation:
How can we tend to the little things in life when we are so busy tending to the big things? (and when we are so distracted by the many unimportant and irrelevant things)
and
How can we adequately expect to tend to the big things in life, when we do not bring our attention to the small things? If we cannot attend to those every day things, if we let things slip by our awareness every day in a "one day I'll get to it - one day" state?
I put a picture up in our room a couple of weeks ago. I've been meaning to do it since last November. It took me less than 10 minutes to do, including the time it took for me to run up and down two flights of stairs and wrestle with our impossibly messy tool box to find the hammer and picture hook.
I made it bigger in my mind. I thought the exact location needed to be perfect. I thought I'd need to measure things, find a stud. I was scared about not finding a strong enough hold, because it is a big and heavy picture, and these walls are over a hundred years old, covered in plaster.
And then I decided it needed to get done. I had a short space of time, and I would just do it. I decided I would choose the wall that looked the best that day, and if we got furniture later that meant it needed to move, I could move it later. I decided to use my senses to knock on the wall and listen and feel for the secure spot. I used my body and my eye-line to chose the location, knowing that I could move it.
I decided if I made a hole and it wasn't secure enough, I would be able to move to another spot nearby and the picture would probably cover it up. I decided it didn't need to be perfect, it just needed to be up.
And then it was. Only one hole, secure, and looking great in the placement that it was.
Now the picture is up, and there is one less thing on my “one day” list. That brings me satisfaction. And for the next week or two, it brings me pleasure every time I walk in the room and see it there. Which means I’m not walking in the room, looking at the picture in its former state thinking “I really should put that picture up”
Tending to this one small thing has changed the way I enter this room.
Eight months of procrastination resolved in under ten minutes.
What other small things can be tended to? What seems big, but really could be manageable when taken one step at a time, boiling down to simplicity, to necessity?
Is it possible to enter a room and have no more “small things” to deal with and experience only pleasure and satisfaction?
I wonder, what effect that would have on living?