skip truck drivers, musicians, flow, mindfulness

(Found a way of avoiding the exhausting business of thinking up witty post titles - just string together a few words on your subject matter, job done...)

People sometimes confuse mindfulness with concentrating on the task in hand. But maybe one can merge into the other most productively.

Had a skip delivered to Munday Mansions this morning. The driver had to get his truck down our narrow, over-grown "drive" (a few yards of rapidly disintegrating ancient tarmac), navigate a twist at the bottom, do a nine-point turn, back the thing into a gap about a foot wider than the truck, offload the skip a metre or two in front of our LPG gas tank so I was imagining disaster scenarios. No worries. All done swiftly but unhurriedly, indeed with some panache. An inch or two to spare all round was no exaggeration. And off he trundled.

Reversing, I find, can be one of those things where the harder you try, the worse it gets, and tension in the neck and elsewhere really ruins the attempt. I reverse best when I'm relaxed; you too, I daresay. But of course, you have to concentrate. It's like plastering - relaxed concentration, and don't fuss at it, one sweep and leave it. Give it the wrong sort of concentration, get tense and pick at it, and it's a mess.

So was the skip truck driver in a state of mindfulness, of being entirely in the present? My guess is that although he wasn't in a meditative state (hard to drive a truck in the lotus position..), to drive that skilfully, he must have been showing a high degree of presentmomentness. And you can only drive like that after a lot of practice and experience. Skill, and relaxed concentration. Perhaps the concept of "flow" is closer to it.

Like music. You practice and practice, play a lot with different people, and eventually, whatever the musical form, It happens. A folk music trio I know describe how, at their weekly sessions, things sometimes go OK, but sometimes the tune just seems to play itself; at the end of the piece, they put their instruments down and say things like "wow, what happened there?" Flow is what happened. They were entirely in the present moment, and it almost felt as though the music was playing them. They are left elated and slightly puzzled. Some would call those moments a spiritual experience.

But don't forget the hard pactice, i.e. skilful repetition. Although you can get yourself into a mindful state whilst washing up, that's not flow. How much do you need to practice before you can wash up efficiently? I have never felt confused about whether I was washing the dishes or the the dishes were washing me; it's not music.

But you can stop ignoring what you're doing, or feeling dismissive about it, and hurrying. You can bring your mind entirely into the present, and lead it gently back whenever it wanders off to this afternoon's appointment or yesterday's irritations, that builder's bum or this anxiety about.... whatever. If you can do that, you find that washing up is not such a miserable waste of time, because you and it are both Now. And in any case, there's nowhere else you can be, but Now.

But flow, it ain't. That skip truck - it flowed into position.