Aren’t the birds lovely? I hope you heard that okay. I reminded myself to stop for a few moments and enjoy, and hopefully they’ll carry on chirping away in the background.
Before I embraced this mindfulness with compassion idea I was very reactive in my life and I was turning into a real grumpy old man. And I wasn’t proud of him and plenty of people didn’t really like it very much. And then I embraced all of this and I’m much more present, much less reactive, much less grumpy. That’s good.
Then a friend of mine asked to meet up for lunch this week. And I did. It was lovely to see him. And then came the moment when he said: What’s wrong? It was a loving, gentle question from a compassionate place. What’s wrong?
I said, what do you mean? And he went on to give me three examples from recent weeks where he’s seen that reactive, grumpy old man pop up! And he didn’t like meeting that grumpy old man again, who he thought, and I thought, I’d left behind.
It was a bit of a shock to the system. However, I trust him, and I knew he was saying it lovingly, and he gave me that chance to step back a bit and acknowledge that he’s right. And on those three occasions, possibly others, the reactive, grumpy John has been, not just popping up to say Hello, he’s been popping up to be that miserable old bloke.
And it helped me to reflect a bit. I was able to talk a bit about what’s going on. And that was helpful, and it’s why I’m recording this today. I’m not going to go into the whys and wherefores just now about what may or may not be going on with me, but I wanted to record how precious it was that he went out of his way to lovingly ask me what was wrong.
What I would suggest is that there may be people in your life who maybe could just do with you saying in a friendly and compassionate way: Hey, what’s going on? How are you? How can I help? Especially if you’ve seen something uncharacteristic going on in their life.
Some would say that’s interfering, and it can be. I know I can be a bit pushy at times when I’m trying to be helpful, and trying to be helpful isn’t always helpful!! But this isn’t that. This is gently saying to somebody: What’s wrong, what’s going on? And giving them that opportunity to reflect and see what might be going wrong and how they might address that.
Better still is if I’d noticed for myself. And actually, the truth is that I had noticed for myself that this is happening and I pushed it away. I didn’t want to look at it, and I pushed it away. And it took a bit of a startled moment from my friend to ask me what’s wrong to get me there. And how much better really it would have been if I’d used my mindfulness, as I’m so often telling other people, if I’d used my mindfulness to notice what was happening and take a look around inside and see for myself: What’s wrong? What’s getting in the way? Why is this happening? Curious? Such an important word in mindfulness. We’re not trying to work everything out. We’re being curious.
So there’s my suggestion, invitation. Look out for your friends and family, and if there’s something you need to ask well, ask it. Ask it rather than tell it. And how about taking some time today, maybe on a walk as I’m doing now, how about taking some time today to just have a little look around inside? Not do a heavy duty analysis, but a little look around inside and ask yourself. How are you? And see what happens…
