2023 November Meditation

The contention around whether to wear masks or not during this pandemic brings into vivid focus what happens when we forget that we are all in this together and that we need to work together to help prevent unnecessary illness and death. So, this week’s practice in conscious living is going to be somewhat shorter and to the point:

• For the coming week, I invite you to notice what you are doing to contribute to the welfare and well-being of all of us. That might include wearing a mask, which infectious disease scientists have said again and again will reduce the spread of the virus. It might include donating money to a cause you care about, marching in a protest, or doing volunteer work in your community. It might mean checking in on elderly neighbors to make sure that they have what they need, or creating a friend network, if you haven’t done so already, so that everyone has someone to turn to in case of need.

A couple of weekends ago, I took a walk across Central Park to say hello to the office I had for 33 years. It lives on the corner of 90^th and Central Park West in New York City, and for all those years I was able to look at trees in Central Park every day, all day long. That office and I had many powerful experiences together over those years and as I walked back across the park a practice came to mind that I spoke into the phone as an email and sent to myself to work on later. The process of creating that practice reminded me that for all the years I walked across Central Park each weekday morning, I often had my most creative inspirations during those walks.

A couple of days later, when I settled in to write up the practice, I discovered that it had disappeared into the mysterious realm of “where did that email I spent so much time creating go”? The email I sent to myself is nowhere to be found. No amount of searching has revealed it. So, that practice is lost somewhere in cyberspace and seems no longer to be in my head, either.

What this brought into my awareness was the importance of recognizing when there’s nothing to do but to go with the flow of what’s unfolding. And so, what arises from my experience is this practice that I’m sharing with you right now. Since I realized the email was gone, gone, gone, I’ve been having to accept that what I had wanted to share is no more, so I can now engage the practice of letting go of preconceived expectations and, instead, being present to what is.