Amanda Salisbury Books

Mindfulness has long been as thorny for me as ‘happy medium’. As I miss something today, I find that I now have a different answer to this multiple-choice question.

Multiple Choice.

Knowing that someday you will or might lose something (a person, experience, or stuff), you:

A. Avoid the thing you’ll someday lose to prepare yourself.

B. Take energy from something enjoyable today to refocus it on the bad feelings you expect to someday feel.

C. Enjoy the things you have now, knowing you cannot prepare and you deserve really great showers.

Like many multiple-choice questions, the proper answer to this one is obvious. But proper doesn’t always mean true. For a long time, my answer would have been D. Both A and B. Today, I miss fewer really great showers and the ones I miss don’t hit as hard.

Now, the shower analogy in answer choice C above belongs to someone else—let’s call her BB. Her story was the one helpful bit of counseling I carried with me from our time together.

BB said, “When I was a teenager, I realized that my dad would die. We were close, and I loved him. He wasn’t sick. I just came to know that someday he would die.

“So I started spending every shower crying as if my dad had died. I’d start the shower, think about my dad being dead, and sob until the shower was over. This went on for years.

“I convinced myself that I was preparing for my dad’s eventual death. By crying now, it would be less hard whenever it happened.

“My dad died when I was forty. None of those tears made his death hurt any less. It wasn’t easier at all.

“What I learned is that I just wasted a lot of really great showers.”

BB’s story has become part of my own narrative in that it resonates with me. I’ve wasted a lot of really great showers. And other times.

A few years after BB shared her story, I finally began the practice of pruning my thoughts. That’s a different (future) blog. But I started looking at showers differently after I heard BB’s story, and it all led back to mindfulness.

The more formal version of ‘really great showers’ is ‘be present’ or ‘be mindful’. The showers thing stuck with me in a more visceral way by showing me the exact thing I was missing.

Like BB, I feared the future. There are lots of ways to ‘miss showers’, including perchance:

• Avoiding people you love (instead of living alongside them) because you know (or fear) separation from them due to death or a move or whatever
• Shutting down happy awesomeness with teens (instead of embracing current connections) because you know (or fear) they’ve made decisions that will eventually lead them into temporary unhappiness or difficulty
• Dropping out of plans (instead of jumping in) because you fear some possible future rejection
• Sobbing in the shower (instead of enjoying the heat, the water, the time…) because you know you will need to cry someday

These are easy, great ways to miss a lot of really great relationships, experiences, and, yes, showers. But sometimes the present is hard, too. Truly hard. Sometimes it’s merely irksome. And the temptation can be high to live in some (good or bad) future by invoking it now.

When the present is unpleasant, as with the devil-virus currently occupying my respiratory system, I guard against regret. I don’t want to miss more really great showers. I think about all the ones I’ve already wasted or missed, and it pains me to miss more. Today I miss a walk and a brunch, and while it pains me it doesn’t undo me.

Today marks ten years since my mom had a liver transplant. It’s also the day of the breast cancer awareness walk in OKC. My family of origin is together even as I write. Some walking, some cheering, some gathering. After the walk to support my sister-by-marriage, they’re going to brunch downtown.

And I am here writing for the first time in a week. I’m not sitting it out this time. I’m sicking it out. Choosing not to backslide in this respiratory illness that has kept me from most everything but saline, humidifying, and less polite interventions. Choosing not to share this devil-virus with immune-compromised people. It’s not a waste of a shower but a missed shower all the same.

What I’m not thinking: Someday I will not have these opportunities to bond with my family.

What I am thinking: I am so grateful they are enjoying this opportunity to bond, I wish I were with them now, and I cannot wait to be with them again.

That’s a sea change. And not sobbing this morning should really be a boon against this devil-virus.