A childhood friend visited recently from out of state. He had seen my botanic photography online, but had never been to my Virginia home. We stopped by my house briefly on our way to lunch and my heart clenched when he said, “I want to see your garden.”
Ugh. I opened the gate and led him into the untended mess in my back yard.
He looked around perplexed and said, “THIS is where you take your photos?”
I scanned the garden and, like him, all I saw in those few seconds was weeds. “You caught us at a bad time,” I said (“us” meaning the garden and me).
I had the usual mid-summer excuses — travel, visitors, prioritizing family. Come to think of it, I have excuses for every season of the year during this particularly full chapter of my life.
That was about two weeks ago. In the meantime, more visitors, more travel with family.
Today is the first time in weeks that I have been able to turn my attention to the garden.
Choosing Where to Rest Attention is a Skill
It seems like everything I do or think about these days circles back to my ongoing Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute teacher training. Today’s garden musings reaffirm on many levels one of the core SIY teachings:
Attention–including choosing where to rest attention–is a trainable skill.
Mindfulness meditation is the formal, dedicated practice of attention training, with neuroscience and other evidence-based studies showing increased focus and less mind wandering with regular practice.
But the trainable benefits don’t stop there. Though human brains are wired for negativity bias (we tend to give greater weight to “bad” experiences and memories rather than good ones, probably as an evolutionary protective mechanism), we can train ourselves to reframe our perspectives and outlook on life in ways that enhance our sense of well-being.
So today, instead of heading into my untended garden with a sense of overwhelm and inner-criticism, I went on the hunt for hidden beauty behind and between the weeds.
First full bloom from the dahlia tubers I planted the morning I left for SE Asia in April — she was totally hidden behind weeds, with her face buried in the purple smoke bush!
Magical creatures in unexpected places. (Though, what is an “expected” place for magical creatures?)
Energy pulsing.
Pollinator garden at work.
This skill of choosing where to rest our attention can be applied to every layer of our lives. For example, we can choose to rest our attention on pleasant memories from our childhood rather than difficult memories. Doing so doesn’t mean the difficult situations never happened. It simply means that we widen the lens to capture the full range of our experience, stepping out of our brain’s autopilot setting that gives more weight to the negative side of the ledger.
Instead of choosing to rest our attention on what can go wrong with a new experience (new job, new school, new relationship, new location), we can choose to envision a positive outcome. Try it and see how much less energy it takes.
Sure, this can all sound a little annoying and Pollyanna-ish. In case you’re too young to know this term, here’s the Oxford Dictionary definition:
Pol·ly·an·na
/ˌpälēˈanə/
noun
- an excessively cheerful or optimistic person:
“what I am saying makes me sound like some aging Pollyanna who just wants to pretend that all is sweetness and light”
Nope. We’re not channelling Pollyanna here.
Shit still happens. Mindfulness practice doesn’t make that go away. It just helps us respond more skillfully to life and the people we encounter on our journey.
And on a daily basis, having control over where we choose to place our attention is pretty empowering. For me today, that meant celebrating joyful discoveries of beauty tucked between the weeds.
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