Friday, March 2, 2018

Not a Book Report and Not the Last Flower Picture I Will Use



(I did not finish a book this week, so this is a post about mind-body stuff.  “Stuff” is a technical term, of course.)

Because I am having surgery on Monday, I filled out an advanced health care directive and got it notarized this week.  Which means I’ve been thinking about life and death.  Cheerful, eh?

I am going to die, but probably not on Monday.  We all are.  That means that at some point, we will do things for the last time.  Sometimes we know when the last time is and sometimes we don’t.  When I visited my parents recently, my dad gave me his baseball mitt.  He has played catch with it for the last time.  I doubt he knew that when he was doing it, but he knows now.

We create rituals for this.  That’s what graduations and weddings are for.  Even birthday parties serve to mark the last time we were a certain age and the first time we were the next age.  They help us notice.

Mindfulness helps us notice more often.  Being fully in the moment, whether we are biking or swimming, can give us a deeper sense of what we are doing.  Then, when we have biked or backstroked for the last time, we can remember how our muscles felt, how our emotions soared, how glad we were to get to the top of the hill or the edge of the pool.

That might make the last-ness a little less final.

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