Every morning it is a choice. I gradually wake from a world of unconscious awareness and I am faced with an immediate option of choosing to embrace a new day or not. This is no simple choice, but it is mine to make. Mine to seize or to ignore. Life is that way for humans.
I have a latent awareness that lets me choose whether or not to experience what being alive means. It is mine. It will follow me through the day. It will tug at my consciousness again and again and again.
This is an unknown day. It could be a day of immense happiness or incredible sadness. It is hard to predict, even when I try. Predicting is something I unfortunately try to do before my feet even touch the floor. I still have a choice whether I will embrace, experience it in the fullness or silently and passively drift through the day.
Choosing to be mindful is a choice to be engaged, to feel engaged, to be intimately engaged.
I am aware that every step I take can be filled with the joy of movement and contact. Or it can happen in a totally unaware way without any of the experience and engagement that I am capable of feeling.
When I first wake, I typically have hints of what the day might be like. I predict what actions I might take, the people I might get together with. To some degree, I have a moment of awareness and engagement, even though the reality of the day is uncertain. My only choice, however, is about the now, how much am I open to what is happening right now as I sit on the edge of my bed.
I still don’t know how much that openness will flow and continue through the day. I don’t yet know if I can embrace the accidental, unanticipated encounters. Will I be able to absorb the anticipated disappointments of encounters not acknowledged by others?
My choice is not only to be aware. A basic awareness comes naturally, and I will not avoid it except by distraction, or going back to “sleep” in a figurative manner. But I can choose to really feel, beginning with the carpet under my bare feet, the cool hard surface of the bathroom counter, the warm and alive outpouring of the shower.
These are all choices I can make repeatedly and they set patterns of awareness I want to carry with me throughout the day.
So I sit on my cushion and I open all my pores of awareness, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I allow my body to relax and feel with all its strength. It is a moment of being aware that this is what it can feel like. This is what the day can be like. This is a taste of what it is like to feel fully human.
I freely give myself to it as I hope to give myself to every subsequent moment of the day. It is a time to fully embrace both happiness and sadness, real and anticipated in my imagination. It is an embrace I feel through my whole sitting self. I want to learn how to experience everything I do in this manner.
I choose to live this day. I choose it in its raw fulness. I choose my aloneness. I choose my garden. I choose my friends. I choose my planned activities. I choose all the surprises.
I want to experience them all and feel them just as I deeply feel the softness of the carpet, the coldness of the counter, the heat of the shower. I choose not to miss what this day might present.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
– Rilke