Home Sweet Home

After some 18 hours of travel and one-hour of airplane sleep, I had a series of little challenges getting back from the airport to my home. A growing number of people— me included— are coming to understand that it’s not what happens to you that counts, but how you respond to it. Whether it’s a 4-alarm disaster, a series of small annoyances or winning the lottery, we are responsible for our own reactions and the more consciously we can be aware of them, the less of a grip they have on us.  We can learn to greet them all with equanimity instead of being tossed hither and thither by the apparently random slings and arrows of fortune, outrageous and otherwise. Which doesn’t mean covering our feelings, as a fellow high school alum described in a poem, by putting “meditation bandaids on whatever feelings were seething under the surface.” Feel the feelings, groan with displeasure, shout with rage, whoop with exultation as appropriate, but also step back a bit and note them mindfully as waves on the surface of deep, calm waters. 

 

So I grunted my annoyance at the airport and then finally riding BART back home, wrote a blogpost trying to express my little story as eloquently as I could, with minimal whining and a touch of amusement. That helped. Then went to work getting the notes to my xylophone classes done and that helped yet more—work is always a great way to refine one’s focus and attend to the things one can control amidst all that we can’t. 

 

Now back home after a three-hour horizontal sleep, an unpacked suitcase, a food shopping trip and soon, my reunion with the piano. Should I publish my little account I wrote about the airport? No, I should not. The story, a variation of things we all have experienced, is not of particular interest. But the point of how to respond to it might be. Or not. As you will.

 

Meanwhile, from sleeping shirtless under a ceiling fan and days of walking barefoot while teaching, playing and dancing at the White Dove Hotel in Ghana, I’m back in blue jeans and jacket and napping under three layers of blankets in the windy, San Francisco fog. No surprise, wholly expected and though I prefer less clothes and relieving the skin of its border guard duty, I’m okay with it. It’s part of my home, as will be the first green salad I’ve had in weeks. Then the first TV I've seen in weeks, Inspector Morse to try to recognize the sights in Oxford where it is filmed and where we visited. Maybe with the heat turned on.