Reflections on eating a banana

In my efforts to become more mindful - well, who am I kidding, there's no "more" to it, how about simply:

In my efforts to start becoming mindful...

Okay.  In my efforts to start becoming mindful I tried to pay attention to eating my banana yesterday.  Really think about how it felt and tasted in my mouth.  Where my tongue tasted the banana.  How the banana looked as I peeled it.  How it smelled.  I was really trying to pay attention to what I was doing, and to focus on the task at hand, without letting my mind wander.

After all, how long does it take to eat a banana?  I mean it's not a long and involved process.  People practice mindfulness all day long, focusing on the task at hand, relishing it, savoring it, putting all of their psychic energy into what they are doing at the moment.  Surely I could do that for the length of time it takes to eat a banana.

Nope.  Not a chance.  I made it maybe one minute and then realized that something had caught my attention and there I was, mindlessly munching away, thinking about something else.

Ahem!  Back to the banana, please!

It took several attempts at refocusing, but I did manage to finish my banana, thinking more about what I was doing than I have in a very long time.

This is the book that I am currently reading.  It is a slender little book.  Simple.  It requires no great effort to read.  It is easy to understand.

And I have had to force myself to read and re-read the first three chapters over and over.

Because in my haste to learn this thing they call mindfulness, I realized that I keep speed-reading through the book, trying to finish it rather than trying to read it.

That has been a revelation to me.

My focus in life is more about finishing the task than doing it.  And not simply onerous chores, where I could perhaps be excused for my desire to just get it over with so that I can move on.  No, I realized that, like with the banana episode yesterday, I so want to accomplish everything that I think I need to complete in a day, that I never slow down to relish or savor anything that I am in the process of doing.

I read during meals, meaning my mind is divided between my food and my book or magazine, so neither gets the attention it deserves.  I iron and watch TV.  While I put away Christmas things (a weeks-long process at our house - the goal is to have it all down and away by Valentine's Day!) I don't reflect on the items, their sentiment or sentimental value; nor do I wonder why we always put that thing in that place.  I simply put things away, all the while scanning the room for the next object, my mind already leaping ahead to the next task, calculating the absolute minimum amount of time I have to spend putting away Christmas things so that I can safely say I worked on the task.

My life is being lived in anticipation of the future, which sounds great, but what it really means is that I am throwing away the present at the same time.  Perhaps that explains, at least in part, why my memory is so faulty these days.  I am not paying attention to my own life, and so have very little recollection of what happened to it.

So while the whole eating-a-banana-mindfully experiment was not tremendously successful, it demonstrated that I can live mindfully, but I really have to work at it.  And it also caused me to realize that I am throwing away my life, in a sense, by spending all of my time anticipating and planning for the future, which I never fully experience since I am busy planning for the next future.

Today I will choose some other small and simple task to practice mindfulness.  It's time I paid attention to my life.


Interested in other books about mindfulness?  Try these:  The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems, Mindfulness in Plain English: Revised and Expanded Edition, A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, and also by Thich Nhat Hanh Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.