Here in the U.S., it’s been a particularly hot and humid time on the East Coast recently, and especially hot on the West Coast, as well.  Many people have been confronted, daily with the challenge of how to cope with the oppressive weather.  Even newspapers have had articles on how this kind of weather frays tempers, makes people grouchy, and generally stretches thin our natural resilience.  Along with everyone else in past weeks, I’ve had a continuous bad hair day and have noticed how coping with the heat and discomfort adds its own level of extra effort – not gigantic and not horrible, but just there.  (Of course, if we’re someone for whom the heat is a health threat, then it does become a major effort to stay cool and comfortable and goes well beyond the focus of this experiment.) 

All of this got me to thinking about how important it is to cultivate the habit of an awareness of choice and to remember that each moment offers a brand new choice point.  It’s easy to get stuck on auto-pilot and to become short-tempered and irritable.  It’s also easy to act from that short-tempered place and to create discomfort for ourselves and others.  Remembering to move through discomfort mindfully offers us a constant opportunity either to continue with how we’re behaving or to change what we’re doing.  

I’ve also been thinking about how discomfort offers us a choice about what we make the foreground of awareness and what becomes the background.  If we’re in a particularly grumpy mood, it’s likely that the foreground will consist of everything that’s wrong, of everything that’s out of sorts.  The things that are going right, the moments of delight, positive surprise, and gratitude will likely fall into the background, as unnoticed as the sound of the air conditioner or fan. 

And so, for this week’s experiment, I invite you to notice how you move through discomfort, how you relate to it as part of your life experience.  So much of the quality of our response to what’s happening in our lives is psychological in nature – is about our relationship to, and interpretation of, what’s unfolding.  If we think that uncomfortable weather shouldn’t happen, or that any number of inconvenient life circumstances shouldn’t come our way, we’re more likely to struggle and have discontent and disgruntlement in the foreground of our awareness.  If we can remember to move through experience as an opportunity to practice mindfully noticing what’s happening and how we’re responding – to use these moments as time of learning more about ourselves – we’re more likely to have a foreground of awareness that’s more expansive, and includes what’s going right.

As you work with this experiment, as is true with all the mindfulness-based explorations we do here, please remember to have curiosity as your companion, and to allow judgment to drop away.  It’s all about increasing awareness, which increases the opportunity to choose.  Sometimes we’re able to move into choices we like, and sometimes we just can’t.  Sometimes, we’re too immersed in what doesn’t feel good to be able to move out of it.  That’s human and inescapable.  We’re all works in progress and the journey of awareness is about noticing how we live with ourselves and move through the world, and it’s about giving ourselves an opportunity to become increasingly skillful at both of these endeavors.