This New Year, Don’t Cultivate Mindfulness
An Unlikely New Year’s Resolution Made by A Dying Woman Unlikely to See the New Year That Just Might Provide the Personal Development Breakthrough You’ve Been Looking For
Kate Montclair, by her own description a compulsive journaler and goal-setter, habitually began thinking about her New Year’s Resolutions in November. The benefit of starting this early, she always thought, is that it distracted her from lamenting the myriad ways she was breaking the present year’s resolutions. The following excerpt from her journal was written even earlier than November. It was written in the late summer of 2020, not long after Kate was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme, Stage IV.
One suggested New Year’s Resolution you always see on the internet is
Cultivate Mindfulness. By learning how to live in the present moment, you will become a more grateful, generous, and intentional person.
Okay, but this is my problem with Mindfulness.
Life is an Express, Not a Local
Sherri (my therapist) has been trying to get me to practice Mindfulness for years. But I’ve always struggled with it. Movie stars seem to be able to do it with ease: Richard Gere, Jennifer Aniston. “Let all those bouncing thoughts just bounce right past you,” Sherri says, “like tennis balls. Without judgment.” But before I know it my mind has bounced from tennis balls to Bjorn Borg to waking up early for the Wimbledon Men’s Final on a Sunday morning to the high school JV tennis team where I got hit in the nose with a tennis ball so that my nose swelled up like Marcia Brady’s when she got hit by the football to watching The Brady Bunch on Friday nights in its original run with my mother sitting behind me quietly nursing her second Manhattan to the scene in Branagh’s Henry V when the Duke of Exeter brings him the case of tennis balls sent from the Dauphin….
And so it goes. Maybe it would be easier if I meditated with Richard Gere?
Admittedly, after a Mindfulness session I do feel a little more quiet, a little less harried. But here’s my beef: isn’t Mindfulness like giving a starving dog a rubber bone? We’d all like to get off the express of time, go beyond even the endless string of days into a single, timeless now. But sorry, kids, Mindfulness isn’t going to get you there. Even when you believe you’ve melted into the present moment, you’re still on a train streaking down the tracks at 100 miles per hour.
My Pilgrimage to Gramps
I remember my grandfather, my father’s father, a stolid Minnesotan, sitting one afternoon at the Formica table in the dining room at his nursing home, where I had gone to see him on a sort of pilgrimage in my lonely late twenties. Gramps was quite old then, over 90. His mental reception was spotty and he couldn’t hear much, so catching-up talk was a chore.
“Where do you live now?”
Me (loudly): “Virginia. Remember Five Hearths? I’m still living with mom at Five Hearths.”
“Eh?”
“Virginia!”
“Oh.”
“I teach school. I’m a teacher.”
Wide-eyed expression of surprise, as though I’d just told him I was an astronaut. I don’t think he heard me. I kept slogging, though. I told him about my school, my classes. I told him about my dream of creating a vineyard at Five Hearths. He pretended to follow me, nodding vaguely with his dry mouth hanging open like a drawer that’s ajar. Eventually I was hit with an inspiration.
“Tell me about your childhood, Gramps.”
The stage lights went up and the curtain opened. Talk about a continuous flow. He talked breathlessly for forty minutes, all the way through the pink chicken thigh and limp rice that Maya, the hostess, brought him and that Maya later took away, barely touched. Talked all the way through the green Jell-O with the sad star of Redi-Whip. Talked all the way through two cups of coffee. He remembered the summer mornings when he and his brothers would tramp all the way out to the Ford Bridge and cross the Mississippi into St. Paul with their paper bags of tomato sandwiches. He remembered the summers when they stayed, all ten of them, in a one-room cabin on Lake Baraboo, Wisconsin, and how on the first night his dad forgot to open the flue to the chimney and smoked them all out, forcing him and his brothers to spend the night in sleeping bags on the porch. He remembered his Uncle Hugh, a tall-tale figure who faked his age so that he could drive ambulances in France in World War I, where he knew a young man from Kansas City named Walt Disney. Uncle Hugh, who played first base five seasons for the St. Paul Saints while working nights at the Grain Belt Brewery, and who once called his hole-in-one on the par 3 on the back-nine at the Hiawatha Golf Course.
Gramps tore through the rusted filing cabinets of his mind, searching for the memory he wanted. His mouth gibbered momentarily, desperately, as he groped for it, and when he found it, his eyes brightened as he lunged for it. Then he was off again. And as he talked, a solitary tear edged over the corner of one eye and slid sideways down the slope of his jagged nose.
Press Your Face Hard against the Window of the Train
Gramps was mourning, but he told his stories not so much out of a sense of mourning but of danger. What was he afraid of? It gradually became clear to me that it didn’t really matter which memory he seized upon. Any one of them would do, so long as it brought back the feeling of that lost joy. What was Gramps afraid of? What am I afraid of? We are afraid of losing any one of those scattered leaves of memory.
Yet they will all, all be lost. Tell your stories to your children, to your grandchildren. Write them down. Write a book. Record them, film them, implant them in the communal memory of the tribe. Nothing can keep them forever. Press your face hard against the window of the train, try to extract a single tree or house from that rushing stream. You cannot do it.
Which doesn’t mean I’m against trying to live every moment. By all means, do whatever you have to do to get through the long winter evenings. Just don’t pretend it’s going to round off the ragged edges of your life. Don’t pretend it’s anything other than a mug’s game. Because one fine day there will be not one atom of evidence of your ever passing through this world and of the love and loss and grief you experienced along the way.
And Yet…
And yet.
Who can stop wanting to keep it all in mind? To see it, to understand it all, and to re-experience, all in the timeless now, that lost joy?
And know that none of it has been a waste.
And that the gratitude was not just a massaging of attitude.
And that the suffering was actually a prologue to a third-act resolution, and not just mindless catastrophe.
Folks, if you can figure out how to be mindful like that, then the hat over my mindless brain is off to you.
Resolve to be mindful, by all means, and enjoy a most Happy New Year.