True happiness, we are told, consists of getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
– Henry James
I started a new job today. Of course, it was very much like the many first days of school and first days on the job that I have had in the past. I picked out my outfit before bed, I set my alarm extra early and I did some quiet reading to calm myself before slipping under the covers. I tossed and turned last night, thinking about who I would meet, if they would like me and I even got around to setting new resolutions about how I might do better at this job than the last one (though that one went just fine). This morning, I was wide awake well before my alarm; thinking about the coffee to be made, the commute I would face and even wondered if the ironing job I had done last night woud suffice.
Lucky for me, my new job-site is just across the East River from where I live in Brooklyn and the quickest way to get there is by boat! Ferry really, but who's counting. It being the first of October, the air was brisk and clean and the wet boardwalk suggested a good rain had washed the place clean. As I sauntered down the wooden planks leading toward the loading dock, it occurred to me that I was actually far less anxious than I had been on the days leading up to this one. I was too busy taking in the surroundings to be nervous, I was living.
It may seem that taking a boat into the office on one's first day of work may have just enough glamour attached to it so as to distract one from the typical first-day jitters (though admittedly I was pretty excited about that part), but what I really was taken with was how being present in my immediate surroundings changed my thinking about my own emotional state. The smell of the river, the feel of the chilly air on my skin and the sight of the mildly ominous gray clouds in the sky created atmosphere to be sure, but what was happening was truly on the inside. As I walked closer to the hardly-charming East River Ferry, I realized I had purpose. My whole being had purpose.
While the absorbing errand ahead of me might have been the beginning of a life's work with a new company, the truth of the matter was that my thoughts were being driven by the present moment. I still had plans for what I might accomplish on this first day but they were newly charged. I was no loger worrying about who I might impress. Instead, I started thinking about the people I might help, the lessons I might learn and the laughter I might share. It was as if the bracing cold functioned like a good, stiff drink: it woke me up! My senses (at least four of them and counting), now exploding with the joy of being stimulated; had errands to run. They now had purpose, and so did I.
Of course, it's quite unlikely that each morning will carry quite the weight of this one. The cold will get much colder, the sky will get much more ominous and certainly, on occasion, that river will exhale far more pungent odors than it did today. And it won't be my first day every day either. There will be days when standing before that river will feel more like staring across Niagara Falls with nothing but a barrel for transport. But I learned something this morning about living, standing there with all my senses going at full-tilt. When I was taking in the world moment by moment, there was little time for much else. I was reminded of the Robert Hunter lyric "ain't not time to wait, barely time to wait..." and it had new meaning. Very often, my ruminations on passed wrongs, future revenges and upcoming failures are the result of being unable or unwilling to live in the moment. Instead of mindfully allowing my senses to do their job, I find myself mindlessly letting my mind find something to do on it's own (which usually involves geting up to no good).
As I relate this experience to the notion of living in an "integrative" kind of way, one of the lessons from my experience is that when I am willing to notice the world around me with all of my senses involved, the integration happens naturally. My senses hold the power to inspire me to shift away from the routine thinking patterns of the past and toward a fresh perspective. In many ways, that is the essence of psychological health; to be able to escape what we have come to believe is "just our way". And I don't mean to refer to escapism as in burying one's head in the sand. I mean to wake up by escaping from oneself and leaning in toward life. Much the way an infant (who has not yet developed the habit of protecting his fragile ego by making sense of everything through filters created by the past) does with each passing moment. Or the way the gazelle does moments after the tiger has passed and the scent of fresh grass compels them once again.
Living in the moment, with the senses fully engaged, we have new freedom to think, to feel and most importantly, to act in new ways. We draw closer to a kind of emotional liberty that moves the process of healing furthur along it's continuum. Integrating our experiences into meaningful (and even powerful) new narratives involves paying attention to the present and not simply forgetting about the past but not remembering it. Each time we notice the sound of our feet breaking a fallen leaf or we smell the the scent of a fresh cut onion or even when we feel the chilly wind blow into our hair, we are living in the moment. And in those moments, there is a brief opening of opportunity to be inspired to try something new, to break an old habit or even, to emerge as something completely different then we were before. This is the moment of integration.