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TwitThisIn Search of a Natural Solution
One simple way to anchor ourselves in the present is to discover an activity that defies acceleration -- something like meditating, gardening, reading or, in Margaret Robbins's case, bird-watching. From the time she was ten years old, the 49-year-old mother of three from White Plains, New York, loved watching birds. She picked up the hobby from her father, a police officer who did it to de-stress from his job and reconnect with nature.
At first Robbins saw it as a way to spend more time with her dad. It took on another dimension once she quit work and became a stay-at-home mom. "My three boys were born two years apart," she explains, "and when you have a four-year-old, a two-year-old and an infant with severe asthma, it's difficult." Her hobby became a refuge. "Some days my husband would walk in the door and I'd say, 'Supper's on the table. I need to get out.' I'd grab my binoculars, and a half-hour of birding would restore me. You can sit and be surrounded by these beautiful creatures. On a deeper level, it's the calmness, the peace, the quiet. It restores your faith in the world and life."
Others have found an even simpler alternative: breath. A few years ago David Anderson, then 43, took scuba lessons while on vacation in Cozumel, Mexico. Loaded with weights, gear and the heavy air tank, he lumbered into the water and dropped like a stone toward the ocean floor. In seconds his world was restricted to two elements: the fish coasting by and the hypnotic sound of his own breathing.
"I have taken breaths by the billions without so much as a thought," Anderson says. "Yet in that one undersea hour, I treasured every lungful."
Even today the soothing effect of listening to that breath haunts him. "Breathing is the foundation for meditation in the Western tradition," he notes, adding, "I do my meditation in the morning when I get up."
Anderson is intimately familiar with conventional meditation. An Episcopal priest and parish rector in Darien, Connecticut, he has given a lot of thought to the hereafter as well as the here and now, which he agrees people sometimes neglect.
"Being in the 'now' brings a freedom," he says, "unlike living in the past or in the future, which is a kind of imprisonment." He adds, "This isn't a kind of denial where you pretend life doesn't have problems. Life is full of problems, but most of those stresses and failures are reliving old hurts or worrying about future concerns."
In his book Breakfast Epiphanies, he describes his scuba moment and asks, "Why can I not live and breathe like that on land? Respiration is the key to concentration." Any repetitive activity that gets us breathing regularly -- swimming, walking, running -- can have the same soothing effect. "It's the hypnotic part you're doing over and over again," Anderson continues. "That's what gets you to the present."
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