Be more like smoothie guy
©2015 David Bivins
I meditate most mornings. It’s not an onerous practice. I sit for 10 minutes in the morning, usually silently with a timer. Sometimes I sit with the daily meditation in the Waking Up app on my phone, but I haven’t been doing that as much lately. While I do meditate often, I don’t do it every single day. But I practice mindfulness every day.
There used to be a deli in my Brooklyn neighborhood that made smoothies with which my partner became a bit obsessed. We were going in there fairly regularly so she could get one. The person who made the smoothies worked behind a little counter with a blender, a small refrigerator, and a freezer that sat on the floor and opened from the top. For each ingredient, he would open the fridge or the freezer, remove the ingredient, close the door, open the ingredient container, add it to the blender, close the ingredient container, open the fridge or freezer, put the ingredient back, get the next ingredient, etc.
There was usually a line for smoothies and we would have to wait a while. I would get so frustrated watching this guy. Here he would have eight, ten customers in a line, all getting mostly the same basic ingredients in their smoothies, yet he would put them away each time, even though he was going to run out of the berries or whatever within a few customers and have to open a new container. “He could just leave that stuff out on the counter!” I would scream in my head. “He’s wasting so much time!” It got to the point where if my wife wanted a smoothie I would just grumble “I’ll wait outside!” like a petulant kid.
Now I look back at that experience and think of how this person’s deliberateness was a practice of mindfulness. Each step was taken with full engagement and each smoothie was just as well-made as the last. He was never rushed, and he was never flustered. He just did the work.
Oddly, I had no problem with such mindfulness at a local sandwich shop. The legend was that it was owned and operated by a sushi chef. With each order, the sandwich maker would open the breadbox, remove a loaf, close the breadbox, slice the bread, and then apply each ingredient with care. By this I mean that each slice of bread would have a perfectly-spread layer of mustard of uniform depth, right to the edgy. The thinly sliced lettuce would be carefully arranged with a pair of tongs. The cheese and meats were sliced on one of those massive deli slicers, and after each ingredient was sliced, the sandwich maker carefully cleaned the entire slicer and swept the bits of cheese and meat into a bin. The slices were folded neatly and completely covered the area of the bread. You know those ridiculous pictures of sandwiches you see on posters outside restaurants, with everything just so, obviously primped and preened by a stylist? These sandwiches actually looked like that. The final step was to wrap the sandwich in deli paper, insert that into another bag with a napkin and a moist towelette, and hand it to the customer.
They were the best sandwiches ever. I’m not exaggerating. I know a lot of people felt the same way. There would be a line out the door, up the block at lunchtime. I never heard anyone complain. I never complained, but I budgeted an entire “lunch hour” just to get the sandwich and was lucky if I could get out of there in less than a half hour. I think I had a different experience with it because they were so good. The smoothies were very good, but I didn’t appreciate how the effort made the smoothies better. I appreciated how the effort in this case made the sandwiches better. Each bite had a blend of flavors that was exactly like the last bite. There was no surprise partway through, where all the jalapenos had piled up, or the pickles had settled. Mayo didn’t ooze out one end. They really were as perfect as a sandwich could get for me.
These are examples of the mindfulness that I now strive for in my life. No hurry, just doing the thing and doing it well. Obviously not all of life can be that way - there’s a last-minute appointment or everyone forgot that we have to make dinner before 6 because we all have meetings at 7. Mindfulness can still be achieved in these cases, but sometimes it’s fleeting.
I learned to meditate in several stages. The first was reading the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. He was a founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and wrote what for me is the most important book about Zen Buddhism. His instructions for zazen (seated meditation) are excellent and he gets into all the stuff you go through when you’re trying to meditate. The second was sitting with my wife (who became a practicing Buddhist) on several occasions each year at Brooklyn Zen Center. One of my favorites was a meditation that spanned several hours on New Year’s Eve through midnight. The experience of sitting zazen and being interrupted at midnight by cheers and noisemakers outside will always stay with me. The third was a meditation class led by Jefre Cantu, a wonderful human being and recently-ordained Zen priest. In that class, we went deep with the Loving-Kindness (aka metta) meditation, one that became very important to me in my early recovery days.
Today, practicing mindfulness looks like this:
I wake up around 5:30am.
I close myself in my office (or suffer cat harrassment) and sit silently for ten minutes.
I write for about 30 minutes, sometimes for this newsletter, sometimes in a stream-of-consciousness “morning papers” kind of way.
I add tasks to my bullet journal.
I water the basil plant in the window.
I soak the cats’ food dishes.
I wake up my son for school
I prepare my son’s lunch.
I was the dog’s bowl.
I feed the cats and the dog.
I wash some dishes.
If my partner is now awake, too, I grind coffee (my coffee grinder is loud as hell).
I make the bed.
I do each of these tasks with full attention. I wake up early enough that I can focus on each task entirely. When I take an ingredient out of the fridge, I put it back as soon as I’ve used it, just like smoothie guy.
The rest of the early morning is freestyle - helping my son make sure he has everything he needs for school, checking the calendar, etc.
I usually don’t check my email or phone at any point until my son is out the door. This isn’t a brag, it’s essential for my mindfulness. I’m easily distracted by the news or how many likes my last post got (or how many new subscribers to this newsletter), and I don’t need that turbulence so early.
I won’t lie: learning to wake up early was difficult for me. But sober David doesn’t need to stay up into the wee hours drinking, so an earlier bedtime makes for an earlier rise. Getting so much done first thing in the day, and with so much care, is worth a lot more to me than going down YouTube or Wikipedia rabbit holes late into the night with a six-pack at my side like I used to.
I love you,
David
