When I was a teenager I would often find myself daydreaming. Quite often this took the form of staring out of my bedroom window… admiring the slightly older girl from down the street as she walked her dog past my house. Until one day she looked up and saw me peeking around my curtain and, guess what, she blew me a kiss!
Yikes! I was a shy teenage boy so rather than see this as a potential ‘in’ for a long term relationship, I nearly died of embarrassment and spent the next three years being careful to avoid her.
My daydreaming crept into the classroom. Whatever was outside of the window always looked more interesting than what was going on inside – even when it was raining. In fact, especially when it was raining. I noticed the raindrops must have been of different sizes because of the variable ripples they’d create in the puddles. And windy days were amazing too. One day two empty crisp packets raced across the tennis courts – cheese and onion versus roast chicken – rarely have I been so absorbed.
And then one day I got told off for daydreaming. Mr Hatcher accused me of ‘being away with the fairies’ and that was it. I immediately labelled this behaviour as wrong and never to be done again. Very quickly I stopped staring at anything – even attractive young women walking their dogs. Then I got older, much busier and I didn’t have time to stare out of windows anymore
Fast forward 25 years and while studying my MSc in Positive Psychology I attended many lectures around the subject of ‘mindfulness’ and how it is being used in the western world to try and alleviate the daily pressures we all face.
I had always assumed that being mindful meant spending a few hours every day in the classic yogic, eyes closed meditative position. Possibly even chanting a few ‘ommmms’?
I couldn’t have been further from the truth. Mindfulness simply requires you to be aware of the moment. The problem is that we’re so hard-wired for ‘busyness’ and our brains are so frazzled with information overload, that being in the moment can be elusive. Rather than pause when we do get a few minutes in our busy day, we grab our mobile phone and do something much more important; like go to Facebook, send a Tweet or catch up with emails.
So my advice is this – learn to daydream again. It will be tough at first and you may even forget to do it for a couple of days – but it can become a habit. Just try it for one minute, right now: stop, relax and do absolutely nothing except focus on your breathing. It’s a sobering thought to understand that you are here, and ‘now’ is all you have. In fact, life is just a series of ‘nows’ and how many have passed you by without you noticing?
Who knows maybe ‘being away with the fairies’ isn’t such a bad thing after all?