It’s down to the last minute of play on the field. The home team is down by seven. We’re still in midfield. It looks as if our last chance might have to be a hail Mary pass. Our game strategy, which has failed miserably, was to teach our sixteen year old granddaughter the concept of mindfulness, the art of paying attention, of being aware of how things really are. In hindsight, I realize how futile my efforts were, and that I was attempting to push a giant adolescent boulder of hormones up the hill.
My last strategy, then, will be to translate into culturally recognizable form a classic buddhist text called the Satipatthana sutra, variously referred to as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. I had given our granddaughter two previous books on the subject. She’s an intelligent girl, whose school class once visited a local buddhist temple, and her upbringing, in our family at least (her dad’s), has been one of exposure to many things eastern.
The Four Foundations, to summarize, are mindfulness of (1)body, mindfulness of (2)feelings, mindfulness of (3)mental concepts, and mindfulness of (4)appearances. The point of this in the end is that everything changes, all things are in flux, and that nothing is inherently permanent. Here has what I have come up with in an attempt to put these concepts into a more concrete form.
Number one. There is nothing you can do to slow the inevitable disintegration of your body. You age, you get weathered, every cell in your body replaces itself every month or so. YOU are not permanent.
Number two. Your feelings, no matter how chaotic, drama filled or explosive, will change, most likely be tomorrow, or by the time you meet the next hot guy.
Number three. Your understanding of what is going on inside your head is still in the larval stage. The more you finish your homework and stay in school, the more tools will be acquired to help you understand what is going on in your brain.
Number four. The world as it appears, no matter how sharp your eyes, ears, sense of smell and sense of touch, is always in flux. It is always not quite what it seems.
It has taken me some six decades to figure this out. For most of my life I have been at the mercy of what buddhists call our monkey mind, incessantly flitting from concept to concept. The goal is to acquire buddha mind. Things as they really are, in the now. I suppose, if I admit it, that my granddaughter is already in HER now, and I should just enjoy theflux that is her being.
Om name padme hum.
