Enjoy the Little Things

A few weeks ago, in the Before Times, an old guy had set up a table down the hallway from my office and was giving out small dishes of Ben & Jerry's ice cream—free. I waited for my turn, watching him as he reached elbow-deep in a big cardboard carton of American Dream, dipping an ice cream scoop held in his bare hand, thinking that this was maybe not regulation food-service hygeine, but it was Ben & Jerry's and it was free. Another old guy joined the first at the table, wearing a denim ball cap emblazoned with "Ben," and began dipping ice cream out of a second carton.

"Here's Ben!" the first guy cheered. And then it hit me. These weren't any old guys serving free Ben & Jerry's ice cream; these were the actual Ben and Jerry. Any qualms I had (slight as they were) about the bare hand in the carton evaporated. After all they probably stirred every batch in the factory themselves, right? And besides, it was Ben & Jerry's served by Ben and Jerry.

I think now how strange that moment was, standing in queue in a crowded hallway waiting for ice cream served by bare-handed old men. How strange it was to be jostled by strangers, to open doorknobs without resorting immediately to hand sanitizer, to shake hands, to sit cheek by jowl on a bus or airplane. How strange that all of the things that were perfectly normal parts of everyday life until a couple of weeks ago are the stuff of nightmares (I've moved on from zombie nightmares to ones about people standing too close together in workplaces).

I wonder too what it will be like in the After Times. Will we continue to maintain six feet of distance between ourselves and the next person? Will we always be just a little bit afraid of each other?

I've been trying to reign in these and other terrifying thoughts this week. I've cut back on my news consumption. I go on long walks around my property or up and down my driveway (even when it's raining, which it always seems to be doing these days). I make things by hand. I order things online, like used books, yarn, and vingate dishes. Everyone needs to define for themselves what is essential, and I guess that about sums up my list. I was made unreasonably happy this week when I found something online I've wanted for a long while—a two-cup Pristine England teapot in chartreuse. I was made even happier when it arrived three days later, in time for my afternoon tea.

Is it frivilous? Yes. Is it materialistic? Yes. Is that so wrong? I hope not. Because if we can't have little things that make us happy in the face of calamity, well then what's the point?

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Mindfulness Monday ~ It's Okay to Feel Weird

It's been a while since I've done a Mindfulness Monday post, and now feels like a good time to revisit those past practices and refocus on being mindful in the midst of pandemic pandemonium (or very long days at home with the whole entire family).



My first MM was to Make My Bed. Believe it or not, I've stuck with this practice—mostly. I'd say nine out of ten days I make the bed. If ever I leave the house before C gets up or if I'm really in a rush or feeling extra lazy, it doesn't get made.

The second was Self Care, which I defined pretty broadly (once I stopped being self-pitying). My self-care routines currently include walking, spending time in nature, making afternoon tea, reading, hot baths, watching TV with my peeps, crafting, painting.

The third MM was keeping track of a Favorite Moment each day. I have not been as good at keeping up with this one, but I restarted a couple of days ago. I think this will be an especially useful practice now that the days are starting to blur together.

Well, I didn't do as many mindfulness posts as I'd thought. Hmm…what does that say?

My newest practice has been to cut way back on news consumption. Sometime last year I'd gone cold turkey on news after three years of obsessively reading and freaking out about all the terrible things the administration was doing, without changing one damn thing. When I went back to work in December and had a free half hour in the morning between dropping the twins off at the bus and needing to start work I resumed reading a little bit of news. But once COVID-19 hit, I'd become obsessed again, again to no good end. What purpose does it serve to read six different analyses of the same terrible press conference? None. So now I'm limiting myself to one hour in the morning and no peeking the rest of the day. It's a lot harder than it sounds, but I felt better the very first day I started.

I've also made it a point to accept my feelings, which seems like it should be obvious, but how often do we try to talk ourselves out of feeling a certain way? It's okay to feel weird, because the times now are very weird. It's okay to feel sad. There are people dying all over the world. People I know are likely to become very sick if not worse. I had plans and expectations for the coming months (years?) that now will not come to pass. My kids are missing out on big chunks of their freshmen years (in HS and college). These are all sad things. And it's okay to be grumpy, especially when it rains for days on end. It's also okay to feel good when the sun's shining and the daffodills are blooming and the phoebe has come home, because even though there are sad things going on, you don't have to feel sad all of the time. That's not good for you.

Mindfulness Monday ~ Favorite Moments

I know this is the week when we (we Americans anyway) are meant to express our thankfulness for the various blessings and bounties we enjoy*. And I know that keeping a gratitude journal or other record of the things we're thankful for is supposed to be good for mental health. I also know that I've mentioned on this blog more than once my superstitions about not only saying but writing down the things I'm grateful for being an invitation for all the little demons to come and snatch those very things from my grasp. So I don't do it. I can't.

But I can write about the good things that happened on a particular day; because those events are in the past, no gremils can take them away. My sister-in-law gave me this little "favorite moment a day" journal for Christmas last year (or the year before??), and I'm sorry to say I've been very lax in using it. But I've just started to put it into practice and intend to keep it going, even (especially) once I return to work.

Right now my days are pretty good (mostly because I rarely have to deal with people, other than my husband and kids, and it strikes me that difficult people are the prime ingredients in bad days). So the journal is almost superfluous—every moment is a contender for favorite. I'm going to have to work a lot harder to have good days when I'm selling 10 hours of them to other people. Laura Vanderkam writes in Off the Clock that doing things that stand out in our memory is a good way to make time feel less fleeting. It stands to reason that a practice of writing down the good things that happen each day is a good way to manifest good things happening. I'll let you know how it works out.

Mindfulness Monday: Making My Bed

I have just about a month left before I return to work, and I've decided to try to blog every day (or at least every week day) of that month. My reasons are varied and probably not that interesting, but at the top of the list is this refrain that I've heard and repeated over and over again this year: Summer went by so fast. Where is fall going?

I want to try to keep track of what I'm doing, how I'm spending time, in hopes of slowing it down a bit. I'm also going to make use of dorky alliterative headings to help myself focus and develop ideas of what exactly to write about. Welcome to the first Mindfulness Monday.

I won't pretend to be an expert on mindfulness, or even pretend I know very much about it at all, but it's long been a somewhat squishy and amorphous goal of mine: to be more aware of what I'm doing in each moment of the day, to be more fully present, to spend less time and energy wishing for something different out of life. I'm not even sure if or how today's post fits into the realm of Mindfulness as a quasi-spiritual practice, but instinctively it feels like a mindful thing to do.



I never in my life have made my bed on a daily basis. Though my mom did make her bed, it wasn't something she expected of her children (probably falling into the realm of "pick your battles"; when it would take a snow shovel to reach the bed, whether the sheets and blankets are smoothed neatly becomes a moot point). In college, I was prone to taking naps; a made bed would only have interfered with that practice. Ditto when I had small children who napped in my bed at various times during the day. In between college and small children and now, I just never saw the point. You're going to mess it up again in a few hours anyway, so why bother? When I heard a report that found that unmade beds had lower levels of dust mites because moisture had less chance of getting trapped between the sheets, as in made meds, I felt vindicated. Take that, bed-makers!

Then this summer I was flipping through a book I had gotten for M—Cal Newport's How to Win at College—looking to see if there was any advice that might apply to regular, non-college life, and came across the suggestion to Make Your Bed Every Day. I don't remember Newport's reasons  (probably something along the lines of an orderly mind in an orderly environment), and I don't remember why I suddenly decided to give this practice I'd eschewed my whole life a try, but I did. And I've kept it up.

And here's where I think it fits into mindfulness: The made bed is a small oasis of calm in my room, which is in a constant state of disarray due it being the last frontier (other than the basement, shed, and garage) in my summer project to clean, declutter, and reorganize my house. That calm oasis keeps me from feeling either overwhelmed or driven to clean when I have more pressing things to do. It also creates a clear delineation between night/sleep/rest time and morning/work/focus time. I leave it unmade (to keep out those dust mites) for a couple hours while I do my morning routine of yoga/breakfast/writing, then when I go upstairs to get dressed (one really lovely thing about not going to an office every morning is that you can get dressed at 10 a.m.), I make the bed, and signal to my brain that it's time to start the work part of the day.

I'm not suggesting anyone else try this at home. Dropping into the tangled sheets of an unmade bed for an impromptu afternoon nap is a really lovely experience, and I wouldn't deprive anyone of that for the world. But for now, a smooth, calm, made bed works for me. Once I start having to leave the house at 7 a.m., all bets are off.