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Mindfulness is not a journey. Though it sometimes feels that way.
It’s not a waste of time, a mark of spiritual superiority, or a trial in which we must battle for every inch of progress, although sometimes it feels that way too.
This gap between how it feels and how it is, is not because we’re unable to grasp what mindfulness is, but simply because it’s so different to everything else we try to grasp.
We’re used to signposts and checkpoints, to beginnings and ends, to thinking we know what comes next, even to blind alleys, and mindfulness allows us none of these things.
Mindfulness is not a journey, because journeys follow paths, and nobody else’s will be quite like our own.
Mindfulness is not a journey, because journeys have a destination, and we are already where we need to be.
Mindfulness is not a journey, because journeys end, and we are endless.
No, what mindfulness is most like is allowing ourselves to fall. An act of faith in ourselves, that we repeat every time put our trust in what is within instead of what is without. A move from the familiar into the unknown, and sometimes back again.
Mindfulness is a constant, fleeting, surprising, agonising, joyful, frustrating, humbling fall, which, as falls generally do, ends sooner than we want it to. But, in those brief, peaceful moments when we truly let ourselves go, we remember we know how to fly.
