Essays

I had been falling behind my body-work and meditation practice routine. I had a valid expuse: water shortage. With piped water available for only two each morning, washing clothes was a priority leaving little time to attend to other work.

Swamiji visited our city. I called on him. When we met he asked me how our meditation was going. I had to tell him of my 'washing obsession'.

 Swamiji smiled and said: "Well, if you are washing clothes when you are washing clothes that is good." Noting my puzzlement, he added: "If you are doing your practice, while all the time your mind is held by idea of 'oh dear, I should be washing clothes instead'—the practice is almost useless. And when you are washing clothes, you do it with attention and mindfulness, not thinking that you should be actually doing your meditation or practice—then, washing clothes can be your meditation."

Thich Nhat Hanh taught the power of mindfulness and the importance of being present and fully engaged in each moment and in each act.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that this consciousness or mindfulness rejuvenates everything, giving a "quality of beginning" to the most everyday action. He quotes Henri Bosco who wrote of the I ransformation of an object through attention: of how, polishing an old wooden tray, the soft wax enters into the polished article under the pressure of hands and the effective warmth of a woollen cloth does the rest to bring back the lustre.

There is a kind of 'sculpting effect' that is produced in many of our objects through prolonged use. A new hammer has little 'character', but if it has a wooden handle, it will eventually take the shape of its renewed contact with the worker's hand and his work.

Then, there is case of two New Delhi parks. One was the responsibility of the local municipality, the other of the residents of 10 local streets. The city park, maintained over the years by professional workers who put nothing of themselves into it, "expressed no creative dialogue with its surroundings, and evoked none from those who frequented it". Naturally, it was strewn with litter and frequently vandalised. It looked like a neglected desert.

The other park, designed and built and planted by local residents and their children, "was a world" of caring and invitation to dialogue with its spaces—"a lived and living thing".

My father's legacy to us is his simple, direct advice: "I do 'something caring' for a different part of my house every single day." So, learning from him, each of us daily plicks a corner, a shelf, an object—whether it is an art piece or a kitchen pot or pan—so as to bring about loving 'dialogue' with it each day.

D.H. Lawrence's words sum it up: "Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life. But giving life is not so easy. It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool or letting the living dead eat you up. It means kindling the life-force where it was not, even if it's only in the whiteness of a washed pocket—handkerchief."

Mindfulness—The Life

Being mindful gives you some extra life—the more you do, the more you get.