Edel Coffey: Little reminders everywhere of the importance of attitude adjustment
Edel Coffey; a sometimes unintentional optimist. Photo: Ray Ryan
Monday is always an interesting day at the school gates. It’s the beginning of a new week, and everyone is re-learning the skills of an old routine as if they were doing it for the very first time. There is an audible denouement as the bell rings, the yard empties, and the doors close on our children for the next five hours.
We adults shuffle away from the gates, a bitter-sweet leave-taking, putting on our various personas required for the next shift, the part of the day where we activate our professional selves and try to make it all happen within the school timetable, so that we can be focused and present parents by the time we return to the school gates to retrieve our children.
Julie has been my friend since I first moved to Galway seven years ago. I’m always happy to see her at the school gates. She’s always cheerful, always lovely and always real. Last Monday after the bell rang, I noticed she was wearing a tiny enamel brooch. It was a sleek swimmer in red swimsuit and cap, her hands stretched out over her head as if poised to dive deep into the ocean. Or so I imagined. I instinctively reached out to touch the brooch, twisting the tiny swimmer a little bit so that her hands were pointing downwards, as if she was leaping off a rock into the ocean. But Julie told me, no, the swimmer is supposed to be pointing up, as a reminder to keep looking up, keep swimming up towards the surface, towards the light, towards the air. Ah! How wonderful, I thought.
It was great advice for a Monday morning, a positive way to start the week. I told her I thought it was a lovely idea, to have a gentle reminder like that to keep your spirits up.
We got talking about the various ways of doing that and she surprised me by telling me that I was always smiling and this in turn made me a mood-shifter for people. I am, by the way, not always smiling. My deeply-furrowed Klingon forehead is the evidence of my near-constant scowl.
However, I concede that I will always smile at anyone I make eye contact with. I have even been known to smile at dogs. “You have no idea what that means to people,” Julie told me. I hadn’t really thought about that aspect, but the whole conversation got me thinking about the tiny things that act as reminders to keep swimming, so to speak.
I’m a deeply inconsistent (by which I do mean lazy) practitioner of meditation, but I have been trying to improve my practice by just doing a one- or two-minute meditation at my desk before I start work every day. I sometimes use guided meditations, which often come with a ready-made mantra, or what is referred to in the meditation community as an ‘intention’.
It’s like a kind of hope for the day or a prayer maybe, or just a thought you might return to throughout the day to ground yourself. I usually set an intention to be more productive, which is a kind of capitalist in tone and almost defeats the purpose of the meditation. But sometimes I will simply adopt whatever intention is set by the voice on the guided meditation.
Last week, I was listening to a meditation by Marianne Williamson (the self-help guru and US presidential hopeful). Her chosen intention was: ‘I see the miracle in all things.’ I was surprised to hear that intention resurfacing in my mind throughout my day — when I found myself getting impatient in the supermarket queue, when I drummed on my steering wheel sitting in traffic — and I was surprised at how effective it was as a circuit breaker, a reminder to adjust my attitude, my perspective, to tone down the impatience.
It’s such a small thing, but I’m starting to think having tiny reminders in our day that help refocus on looking up might be really useful. Most of us actually do this anyway, I think, without even realising it. For example, I was giving a talk to some creative writing students last week about being a friend to your creativity, being open to catching the ideas that flutter into your butterfly’s net and one of the writers in the room admitted she had a tattoo to remind her to do just this.
Whether it’s saying a mantra in the morning or wearing some prayer beads on your wrist or putting something in permanent ink on your body, these tiny reminders can be life savers.
And they don’t even need to be so deliberate. There are reminders everywhere of what Williamson called the miracle in all things, if we care to look: The person who smiles at you as you pass them; the two birds apparently talking to each other on a rock; the gentle ripple of water on your seaside commute to work; the little enamelled swimmer attached to a friend’s lapel reminding you to keep looking up.
