For a lot of people I know, including my inspirational and beautiful mother and sister, baking and gardening seem to be effective conduits to inner
peace while practicing productivity at the same time. For those of us who are multi-taskers, developing
mindfulness in the midst of productivity is ideal. Sitting for hours with legs crossed and cramped whilst
emptying out mind doesn’t necessarily work for us type A "doers" nor for those of us who
can’t actually sit on the floor without intense discomfort.
Lately I’ve been thinking a fair bit about what activities
bring me inner peace. I wish it
were sleeping as it is for so many people since it’s a necessary evil
anyway. Becoming enlightened and
refreshed during sleep is really the perfect scenario, but given the insane threads of my
dream life, sleep is something I would forgo had I the option. Upon awakening, I need to find some immediate inner peace remedies (like coffee) since I am a radiating ball of stress and nerves, rather than a well-rested, centered Eckhart Tolle devotee (all of which I aspire to be).
I also wish baking and gardening were part of my
go-to repertoire for practicing peace, but they both bring me pain, namely in
my back. They also emphasize how truly non-domestic I am. I used to envision myself as a Jane
Granola type of gal: you know, the flower child who bustles around the house in
her Indian flowy dresses always pregnant and flushed with a baby in one hand
and a sprig of herbs in the other, with the smell of freshly baked bread aroma
saturating the background.
The only problems are: pregnancy has never been on my bucket-list, and while I love the smell of
freshly baked bread, I take no pleasure in making it; also, most plants wither at
my glance. As for granola, I despise it.
At big family reunions, everyone would always be
assigned a dish to bring ranging from my mother’s famous Napoleon torte to
potato salad to zwieback and farmer sausage. Everyone would arrive with their Tupperware containers
overflowing with savory or sugary goodness, and I would come bearing the napkins
or the paper plates. (And this was
way-back-when during the time when I actually did some
cooking!) I was pegged early
on for my non-affinity in household affairs. For those of you Mennonite readers, you know that this is tantamount to heresy.
Yes, I do tend to get stressed when I step into a zone where there are multiple ingredients or tools that are required to
concoct a finished product: this includes papier mache, composting or even blow drying my hair with a brush and styling product. It’s not that I can’t
do it, it’s just that I don’t really want to. It is operational overload. I won’t analyze why this is because it’s been 47 some years
of not developing these traits so I
don’t plan to try to change them now. The best course of action would be to get rid of some of my guilt
about my non-doing of them.
So how does a person like me find inner peace in day-to-day
tasks? During my medical leave of absence from work,
I’ve happily confirmed that writing is my inner peace work; that I am one of those lucky
people who can be a writer. (Whether
I can make a living at it remains to be seen.) What I mean by this is that I have the stamina, the
dedication and the inner peace that comes with losing myself in a piece of
writing, whether it be letting the first draft pour out of me, revising and
playing with what’s already been written, or copy editing for mistakes. All of those things rise me up to a
level of inner peace and present-moment presence that few other things do.
One of the reasons I write this blog (aside from ego) is
because it gives me joy to tap out little exaggerated vignettes on my odd little life, and pretty little sentences that might cause you to chuckle or
ponder or say, “I could do that, too.”
The process of writing for me is a peaceful, happifying process. It is one of the few
times where I don’t let my monkey mind mess with my mindful mind; I just let it
all flood out and deal with the repercussions later during the editing sessions. Even then, I can easily laugh off the
grandiosities and the mistakes and the non-sequiturs; I can press delete and
come away with a published little piece for posterity.
I like to have something to show for my inner peace
development. For us type A folks,
an empty mind is not quite enough.
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