Keep Your Eyes Open!

Mindfulness isn't a word that many people use these days. It seems to have roots in Eastern religion; and colloquially means something like "focusing your attention on the present moment and the things happening immediately around you." I learned the word in Boston while I was traveling last year; I was telling a woman I'd just met that the reason I run without headphones is that I want to be fully present to my run; not trying to distract myself from it. She replied simply: "so it's about mindfulness for you." Mindfulness, I thought. That's a word I need to remember.

Of course, I'm terrible at practicing mindfulness. Some combination of my personality and my surroundings conspire to keep my attention drifting far away from me. Interest rates, internal rates of return, income-to-cost ratios, lease contracts, and a thousand other distant tiny details swirl around in my head and blind me to the thousand tiny details right here in front of my eyes.

My happiest moments are always when I'm present to the close details - a moonrise over the water on an island beach, a field of wildflowers in the high Rockies. This is why I hike: to surround myself with wide spaces that irresistibly draw my mind from my investment portfolio. This is why I run: I find speed brings an immediacy to my attention; I can't be bothered with interest rates when I'm seconds from tripping over that boulder.

Rhythms of Green

One of my favorite things about living at home this year has been watching how my mom's windowsills turn green in springtime. My mom is an avid vegetable gardener, and she starts her seeds indoors in February, then moves them outside into her raised beds and greenhouse over the next several months. So throughout the spring, even on snowy days, her house is awash in new plant life.

This annual rhythm of brown to green has always enthralled me. I love the concept of rhythm and applying it to common phenomena, whether it be the rhythm of the earth's orbit around the sun (we call this "summer and winter"), the earth's rotation about its axis (we call this "day and night"), the alternating compression and rarefaction of air in our ears (we call this "sound"), or the superfast vibrations of electric and magnetic fields interacting with our retinas (we call this "light").

Is that fair? Can I take a concept I normally associate with drums and dancing and say it's essentially the same thing as the planets orbiting the sun? I've always assumed the answer is "yes" - because I find that sort of analogy to be a compelling way of dealing with the world.

So, mom, thanks for dancing to the green drumbeat of the earth with your tomatoes and peppers - and I can't wait to join the dance with a tasty stir-fry come harvest time.

Philip Brown's Resume

Interesting title for a first posting, huh? I wouldn't necessarily have chosen that, but it was the first thing Firefox suggested when I clicked, so I figured I'd run with it.

First things first: what's up with the blog name? What's humble about a blog? Hey Internet! Be interested in me! Listen to what I have to say! The whole wide world likes me and reads my words! So maybe I chose the name partly to be ironic, but more because it says (obliquely, perhaps - my favorite way to say anything) something about why I've started this blog. Albert Einstein said something like "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind." Perhaps a better name for the blog would be "frail and feeble," because I'm afraid that's the best I can do when it comes to putting words to those slight details I perceive.

Because it's all in the slight details. Slight details like shooting stars, grains of sand between my toes, the music of the wind rustling through the Aspens, dewdrops clinging delicately to blades of grass. When I look out at the world, I find myself deeply convinced that it all means something. All the right words nimbly evade the fingers of my mind when I try to describe it all, but I reckon it can't hurt to stumble along anyway.

So maybe this blog will fizzle out in time, maybe it will be uninteresting, maybe nobody will read it, or maybe somewhere down the line it'll light a spark in someone to join my quest for humble admiration. Because one thing's certain: there are an awful lot of slight details.