Marcia's Musings: My Life in Segments
/By Marcia Appel — Last Updated: May 14, 2024
I carefully peeled the brightly hued skin of a Minneola orange, revealing the sweet fruit as juice dripped down my hands. Pulling off a few long stringy strands of the pith, the white, antioxidant-rich part between the outer skin and the fruit, my thumbs plunged into the top of the orange, tugging it in half and then into segments. As I ringed the segments onto a plate, a revelation hit me: “Ahh, this is how my life is – a whole lived in segments.”
Almost immediately, life – my life – made more sense to me, precipitated by the news that day of the arrival of a new granddaughter. The segments of my life, like the orange, are sweet even if they sometimes also contain times of turmoil and challenge. They stand alone, and they form a whole.
Being fully focused on the peeling and segmenting of that one orange reminded me, too, of the immeasurable value of being fully present in each moment even while doing mundane tasks. In fact, performing a mundane daily task with full and calm awareness often fosters profound inquiry and insight into the one precious life we are living. For many years, I’ve taught meditation in Green Lotus’s 200-hour teaching-training programs. Students choose a mundane daily task to do with full concentration for one month as their working meditation. I challenge them to either select one that they dislike or, on the other hand, a task they truly love. As part of this assignment, they write a one-page summary of their experience and any resulting shifts in their lives.
Three of the most dreaded daily mundane tasks emerged in our first class, in 2007, and they have maintained their lead year after year:
Making the bed
Doing the laundry (sorting, folding, putting away – anything to do with laundry)
Doing the dishes (including handwashing, loading or emptying the dishwasher, placing dishes back into cupboards – anything to do with dishes)
Students select dozens of other tasks, from vacuuming/sweeping to changing the cat box. On rare occasions, I accept the task of driving to work with full and calm awareness (no music, no podcasts, no audio books, no phone calls, no texting -! - and no reading emails even at stoplights). I say yes to this task request only if I sense someone really struggles with being present on their commute. In truth, most of us would raise our hands if asked this question: Have you ever arrived at your destination not knowing with any certainty whether you stopped at a red light, how long your drive took, or whether you were aware of any other drivers around you?
The discussions emanating from this exercise – and the summaries submitted – create a treasure trove of changed awareness and attitudes toward the disliked daily task. When students mindfully approach the task, enormous shifts occur and spread throughout the students’ lives. An avoidance of making the bed in the morning morphs into an appreciation of the softness of sheets, quilts, and blankets; students rave about the pleasure of slipping into a well-made bed at the end of a long day. Other students wax poetic about hands in soapy water, the feeling of pride in walking into clean kitchens and well-organized living rooms, and how being fully conscious of one task leads to awareness of others.
I remember with a lump in my throat one student finding new appreciation for a spouse simply from making the bed together each day and another student realizing that she was plodding through an unrewarding career in the same way she used to mindlessly plod through daily household tasks. Sometimes, I wish I’d asked permission to reprint their essays into a book on mindfulness and the benefits of applying it to even the simplest tasks.
When these students go on to study other subjects such as Mindfulness Yoga & Meditation, Yoga Nidra, or the Study of the Yoga Sutras, they send notes and emails about how their lives continue to change and their inquiry deepens.
“When these students go on to study other subjects, such as Mindfulness Yoga & Meditation, their lives continue to change”
And so when I peeled my orange and segmented and plated it, I felt in my body the enormous sweep and scope of my life thus far lived: childhood, high school, university one and university two, first career and each career, spouse one and spouse two, ups and downs, good health and ill health, comings and goings, motherhood, and now grandmotherhood. Friends and lovers, with all the richness they entail; travel and discovery; knowing and unknowing, sorrow and joy – even joy in sorrow and sorrow in joy. Life and death, beginnings and endings. All these segments that form a whole, none separate from the other, on and on through eternity toward that which is bigger than are we and yet innately within each of us.
And why? Simply because I peeled an orange with abiding and calm awareness.
