Walking through Central Park one morning after a good, soaking rain, the skies were still drizzling so I had my umbrella open as I entered the park.  Often, after a rain, the trees drip, so an umbrella is handy even when the rain has stopped.  On this particular morning, though, when I was under the trees they dripped with so much water and with such enthusiasm, I was convinced it was still raining.  Then, I would come to an open space and discover that it wasn’t actually raining at all.  Then, I would go under another group of trees and it would sound like rain, not dripping, and my perceptions would again shift to wondering if the rain had started after all. 

After a couple of times of going under trees and being convinced that it had started raining again, only to discover the clear spaces were quite dry, I simply observed my mind’s tendency to draw conclusions from a present experience that I would then use to predict what would happen next.  This is a perfectly normal response, I know, but what interested me about it was to wonder how often I draw conclusions that have absolutely nothing to do with reality simply because my senses tell me something that is true in one context – under the trees – is also true elsewhere – out in the clear spaces.

And so, for this week’s experiment, I invite you to explore your own style of drawing conclusions based on past experience and possibly misinterpreting current experience because of that.  Even more specifically, play with noticing your immediate perceptions, and how it is to stay open to them in the changing moment-to-moment unfolding of experience as compared to the urge to draw conclusions based on past experience.  The invitation here is to keep shifting back into the present moment to discover what’s really going on.  It’s so easy for most of us to get caught up in our stories and pre-digested conclusions that we might miss information offered in our immediate perceptions and experience.

As with all the experiments, leave judgment behind.  This isn’t an exercise in catching yourself doing something wrong.  Rather, it’s an opportunity to see how the mind works – how we tend to cling to what we know already rather than allowing ourselves to rediscover life in each moment – and then to choose to let go of preconceived conclusions and be here now. 

One of the things I have found over the years is that, when I can meet these kinds of awareness exercises with curiosity and good humor, I actually have fun discovering my oh-so-human fallibilities.  Once we know we’re programmed to draw on conclusions we’ve made based on past experience, we know without question that we’re not doing anything strange or wrong – we’re just on auto-pilot.  With these experiments, we have an opportunity to go off auto-pilot and actually mindfully inhabit our own experience.