As a voracious reader and information hound, as well as a copyeditor who works on the computer, I struggle a lot with moving away from all the screens. Since my concussion last August, this has been an even bigger problem as my vision becomes blurry and my eyes fatigue quickly.
Lately, what I have taken to doing is staring at my backyard pond a couple times a day. In order to quiet my mind while I do so, I set a timer for 20-30 minutes and go sit in one of the Adirondack chairs in the backyard, usually with a beverage in hand but nothing else. Somehow knowing the timer is ticking, I don't get antsy about how much time I'm sitting and whether I should be doing something else. I can take 20 minutes to sit, for goodness' sake.
Sipping my tea or coffee, I watch the ducks fly in for a landing, and the Northern Harrier hawk zoom overhead. I hear squirrels chittering in the trees and dogs barking in the distance.
This is meditation without the "woo woo." I struggle to meditate because it doesn't feel natural to me to sit on a cushion and focus on my breath. I'd much rather sit in a chair in silence, beverage in hand, staring at something nice. It slows my breathing and thoughts just as well, and it does me a world of good.
Some words really stood out to me recently when I read them in a No Sidebar post called Why You Need to Unplug: "Unplugged time needs to be built into your life on a rigid, strict schedule until it becomes a habit that you don’t have to think about, or even better, it becomes such a treasured time that you want to unplug even more often."
Treasured time, that's what I'm looking for. It doesn't have to be a "should" but can be something that draws us in. My backyard pond does just that.
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