Mindfulness Over Matterfulness

My youngest sister told me about a time in her life when understanding mindfulness and learning to embrace it would have served her well. I took a several-week workshop on mindfulness a few years ago. They defined mindfulness as paying attention here and now with kindness and curiosity and then choosing your behavior.

She was 14, ready to start ninth grade in the fall, when our father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. She had lived her entire life in Chippewa Township, up the hill from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Our mother suddenly felt alone. She sold our childhood home and moved 35 miles away to her childhood home, Grove City.

My sister said she hated it there. All her friends from school and church were back in Beaver Falls. The kids in Grove City snubbed her and she snubbed them back. She didn’t want to fit in. She didn’t want new friends. She didn’t know or live the words of The Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…” She thought somehow if she remained friendless, got bad grades, and misbehaved at home that Mom would make a change and move back to Beaver Falls, where life would be serene again. That never happened. My sister wasted what could have been the most enjoyable years of her life living in the past and feeling miserable.

As far as I know, she didn’t try drugs and alcohol in high school, but ignorance of a life of mindfulness could have been a sturdy bridge to cross over into substance abuse. I'm glad she didn't travel that way. Nevertheless, there was little "kindness and curiosity," and the behavior chosen was counterproductive.

As Shakespeare pointed out in Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

From A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle: 

If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, “Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable.” The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.