(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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