Day 17

(image courtesy of artboullion.com)

Day 17 – I was reading about mindfulness from Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, this morning. In this book she posits the question, “What do I want from life , anyway?”

In the aforementioned chapter, Rubin talks about finding the idea of meditating unbearable, but still wanting to cultivate “conscious, non-judgmental awareness.” As I read this, I looked down at my cat who was curled in my lap, looking up at me.

Oh yeah, I thought, this is exactly where I want to be right now, so I should take full advantage of being here. This moment is perfect.

During my morning creativity rituals, which entails reading something that inspires me, I tend to get filled with ideas. My mind files these ideas into different essay threads or ways to integrate new, beneficial practices into my life. It gets me excited and my intellectual juices flowing. As Rubin reminds us throughout her project, curiosity invigorates.

I looked down at my cat and thought, in a couple weeks I’ll be in Germany and I won’t get to do this. One day, she’ll won’t be in my life at all. But, more importantly and much more positively (and gratefully), she is here now and I am very happy about that. I told her so.

I turned a few pages in the book and read the line, “Instead of walking though life on auto-pilot, I wanted to question the assumptions I made without noticing.”

I’ve been thinking the key to saying YES is to reject the impulse to hold beliefs based on principle. To open yourself up, you have to move from the assumption of NO to YES.

Yoko Ono’s famous Yes! art instillation came to mind —more so, John Lennon’s reaction to it. I’d heard him talk about it once, the now infamous Ono exhibit where the two met, and how things could have gone very differently between them.

I googled it. In an interview Lennon describes the exhibit, how you had to climb a ladder, then hold a magnifying class up to the ceiling to read what was printed there. Here he is talking about it:

“You’re on this ladder — you feel like a fool, you could fall any minute — and you look through it and it just says ‘YES’ …Well, all the so-called avant-garde art at the time, and everything that was supposedly interesting, was all negative; this smash-the-piano-with-a-hammer, break-the-sculpture, boring, negative crap. It was all anti-, anti-, anti-. Anti-art, anti-establishment. And just that ‘YES’ made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails, instead of just walking out saying, ‘I’m not gonna buy any of this crap.’” (http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/john-lennon30.htm)

If it had said, “NO,” I imagine he would have walked out the door and never looked back. But it didn’t say no, and he didn’t leave, and we all know how the rest of the story goes.