All the Colours

Another good way to be in the moment is to immerse yourself in some creative task or other. Harry mentioned that this happens when he is painting (Harry's art is excellent, by the way. I did a search. You can find it here and here) and the same thing can happen to me when I'm writing. I focus so much on the task in hand that all my attention is focussed here in the present. I lose awareness of any hopes, fears or regrets that might otherwise bug me, and lose awareness, too, of the passage of time.

Doing something creative works well because it absorbs so much of the attention that the mind has no spare capacity to chatter on to itself as it usually does. You simply don't have the space in your brain for all your usual worries, so you have to let them go. But the activity doesn't have to be creative. All that is important is that whatever you're doing commands your full attention.

A few years ago when I used to run the meetings of a local patient support group, I would often be surprised to suddenly discover that "all the colours had bled into one" (to paraphrase U2). It was as though I was suddenly looking through coloured lenses. The walls of the room, which had previously been white, now looked pink, while other things in the room had become an ill-defined colour, as though their original pigment had been mixed in with the pink to produce something sludgy and muddy.

Now as it happens, I wasn't new to this effect, but when I'd experienced it before I'd always been doing something vaguely spiritual - like meditating  for instance. I had no idea what it was all about - I wasn't seeing people's auras or anything I'd heard about, except for that cryptic mention in the U2 song - but nevertheless I tended to associate it with spiritual experience because that's what was always going on whenever it happened. But now I was getting the same effect while simply chairing a meeting, immersed in the midst of everyday life, interacting with other people. What exactly was happening?

Now you may think the likeliest explanation was that I was going out of mind, that I had some kind of mental aberration that was now starting to interfere with my everyday life and some sort of therapy might be advisable. If so, I quite understand where you’re coming from and I hear what you’re saying (as they say). But you may not be surprised to learn that my own take on the matter is slightly different.

I still have no idea what the coloured filter effect is, but over the years I’ve come to just shrug and accept it. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve come to see it as an indicator of when I'm connecting with whatever it is that makes the present moment so powerful. It's kind of like litmus paper changing colour.

So that’s what I think was happening while I was chairing those meetings. I was so absorbed in interacting with the other people that I was very much in the moment. Although I was definitely active and engaged in the world, my state of consciousness seemed to have something in common with a state of meditation. Two apparently disparate forms of action had a strong link between them. And the link has to be about being present, of noticing what is in front of us, whether it’s something creative we're working on, a focus of meditation, or just the person who is sitting across the room from us. It’s all about seeing the world as it really is, which isn’t something we very often notice.

There weren’t many jokes in there, were there? In the next post but one, I’ll tell you a funny story – but first I want to respond to babenbelgium, who left an interesting comment on my previous post, Yabba Dabba Do. See you next time.