The Boat of Inner Calm

The baby wriggling and screaming when you’re trying to change its nappy. The handrail rattling on the bus when you just want some peace and quiet. The loo seat breaking when you shut the lid. Crumbs in the butter. Dirty knives in the cutlery tray. No cloth in sight when your son’s just spewed down your front for the umpteenth time. When the little things in life are piling themselves on top of one another and forming an oppressive, fire-spitting mountain of doom it might just be time to step back and take a deep, deep breath.

Sadly and unfortunately, at times like these, frustration tolerance doesn’t appear to be one of my primary attributes and a deal of teeth-gritting and slow and steady self-talk inevitably ensues.

But I can’t help thinking ‘there must be a better way’.

There’s been a bit of a fad over the last few years for the practice of something called mindfulness. It’s a bit of a nebulous term really but, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, mindfulness is ‘the psychological process of bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which one can develop through the practice of meditation and… other training’ and apparently ‘research studies have consistently shown a positive relationship between… mindfulness and psychological health.’ So, it sounds like a tip-top wonderful thing to do, doesn’t it? And, yes, I’ve tried it a bit and it does seem to work (if you remember to do it when you need to do it). The events of the day have started me thinking again on this whole subject of frustration and mindfulness though and I can’t help but come to the conclusion that, while mindfulness can undoubtedly be a good thing to do, it’s really only the practice of one small aspect of something we humans have already been doing quite successfully for millennia… and that’s talking with The Big Guy, our Maker, The Boss, Daddy (or, what the religious types among us like to call ‘prayer’).

You see, amongst many other things, prayer has the simultaneous function of making us more aware of who we are and less concerned at what we see. When we pray to the right Person prayer actually does the opposite of the thing that most of us are tempted to feel when we think about talking with God.

I rather jokingly referred to God as The Boss earlier and, while He most assuredly is, portraying Him this way can tend to conjure up images in our minds of an uncaring, dictatorial, nag who only cares about us doing the right thing, which is actually pretty much the opposite of who He actually is. Spending time in the presence of God causes guilt and frustration and fear and shame to trickle away. In our busy, media filled lives it’s often hard to get this. It’s often hard to even get our brains to think of our Father for a moment through the static, let alone actually have the space and time to sit and chat with Him for any length of time. But that’s really what He wants to do and if we did it a bit more, well, then the rattling bus just might not be quite so annoying.