So this morning, I did something quite happily. I was on my way into my home office, and getting it ready for the day. That means turning on the lights, opening the blinds, booting up, all that jazz. I also looked out the window and saw that the garbage service had come, and our can was sitting empty at the curb.
This thrilled me. We’ve had a backlog of garbage piling up in the garage. This was due to the holidays, to our lawn guys dumping several ginormous bags of lawn waste on our stoop, and the steady yet relentless flow of used cat litter we generate. (Well, it’s pretty much exclusively my cats doing the generating, but you get the idea.)
So I hustled out to the curb, retrieved the can, and brought it into the garage, where I then filled it with said backlog.
At the time, I was still somewhat inside my daily mental space for contemplation. Today my focus was on being mentally supple.
Being present makes you more mentally supple., more bendy. Instead of staying angry about your circumstances, or overmuch celebrating them (and thus attaching to them) you sort of “surf the moment."
I had this lightning fast integration of gratitude about the garbage. I had been hanging onto some lingering anger and annoyance over the backlog in our garage. But I saw at once how fortunate I was that it had been pretty cold, making the several week backlog palatable. Plus, it hadn’t been TOO cold or icy, so I was safe putting the garbage out in little dribs-and-drabs, one canful (plus recyclables in the blue can) at a time.
Additionally, now I knew how the rules had changed around lawn waste, and what to more sensibly do about it in the future. (I know where the landfill is, and driving a few bags over while they’re still dry is no big deal.)
All this in turn gave me another lightning fast moment of gratitude and enhancement to my practice. One of the truths I work hard to integrate into my thinking is that Tao is neither learned nor taught. It is experienced. And it’s experienced everywhere and anywhere, in each moment. So yes, you can find it on a mountaintop in Tibet, sitting in front of a monastery. But you can also find it at the end of your driveway, inside an empty garbage can.
Happy New Year, my friends.