I have a long term love affair with the Caribbean Sea. It doesn´t matter how many times I see it, I never get tired of contemplating its unendless beauty: Those many shades of turquoise, the white and fine sand that feels at your feet like playing with sugar. Every time I contemplate the sunset I feel like the time just stopped right there. It´s like nothing else exist, or ever existed. I feel like I completely surrender to its beauty, to the universe… to myself. This is my closest experience to the so called Mindfulness.
To stay in the present moment sounds easy, yet many of us are unable to master it, because in the “present” moment of our minds we keep playing with the time like an old cassette: Forwarding or backwarding memories, events, situations, old songs. Its like we are here but not really here. I feel anxious about what the future might bring, or recall something I did or said in the past, thinking how could I have done that better. In those instances I think I´m using my time wisely, to correct things about myself, or to reflect and plan about the future. But when I look at the sunset over that magnificent caribbean sea, it feels just like I´m simply fooling myself.
The sunset dictates the transition between day and night, and yet this transition lasts just a couple of minutes… How can it be? One minute and the sky was full of pink and orange shadows, showing the last blisses of blue… and then a minute later, it´s all dark, like if the light was never really there. How relative can time really be? How vulnerable I feel about time? Like if it controls everything in my life, but at the same time, its just an imaginary barrier that I never see.
Mindfulness, to stay fully on a present moment, seemed to me like like a myth, that you know it exists but maybe not in my own perceived reality. But then I had that bliss at the sea… that moment that got imprinted in my mind like if it would last forever, a glimpse of eternity. Deepak Chopra in “The book of Secrets” defines time not as a linear, nor a clock, nor a river flowing in a certain direction… but just a sensation of the different states of the being. At the end, there is no more time than the present itself, the rest is an illusion.
What I learned from watching and engaging with the sunset, is exactly that: The act of surrender and get rid for a moment of my own ego self-thinking, and discover the amazement of what is happening right now, with eyes of inocence, like experiencing this for the very first time. And by doing so, aligning myself with the sea and the sunset, like a painting that goes all together. I was the sunset, the sunset was I, the ocean was part of me. We all participated in this event. This is my own story with Mindfulness. Finally I learned to:
Remind myself there is always enough time
Understand time displays itself upon us according to our deep desires
Follow my own rhytm
Use better my time, not postponing nor delaying
Be fearless about what future might bring
Stop complaining of what time brought to me in the past
Stop running against the clock, enjoy fully the moment.
“But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like…
“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”
And a little later you added: “You know, one loves the sunset, when one is so sad…” “Were you so sad, then?” I asked, “on the day of the forty-four sunsets?”
But the little prince made no reply.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince & Letter to a Hostage